I would argue this article only slightly missed it's mark: patents are not swords. Patents are nuclear weapons, and all parties in tech have been slowly amassing an arsenal of thousands of them. Some of these warheads are duds, but it still costs money to deflect the bomb away from you to determine that. Others have small tactical explosions. But there are some which are fusion bombs, some are the Tsar Bomba of patents.

You don't argue with a man with numerous atomic weapons, even if some of them might be duds. You fold to his demands. So large companies seek to shut down or absorb threats to their empires, preventing any new superpowers from rising through acquisitions and cross-licensing.

This leads to an interesting and uneasy detente, roughly comparable to the posturing of countries during the cold war.

Between themselves, the superpowers have had to play a careful game of balance. They know that to actually sue would mean a series of counterattacks. Lobbing a single missile might mean that all silos will launch from the enemy camp. The cost of defending and waging multiple simultaneous lawsuits against multiple multi-billion lawsuits has meant that there is very much a state of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) present in the industry.

When Steve Jobs said that he was "willing to go thermonuclear on this" he wasn't being hyperbolic. Apple went from a Cold War to a hot war. Much like the real Cold War, Apple isn't directly attacking Google yet. They are having a war by proxy with Samsung and other Android device manufacturers first. But they are also snubbing Google in a variety of ways with iOS 6. Time will tell if Google and Apple will engage in a dazzling display that will embarrass my WarGames inspired copy of Defcon.

The only winning move is not to play at a society level, by reforming patents.