The patent system is a joke on all levels. Just remove it.
How can you patent obvious things? Why on earth should you have to pay to use an invention you thought of yourself because some vaguely-worded patent was filed a decade ago? In what philosophical framework of justice is that valid?
'You have to pay us because we pre-invented what you invented'. It's Minority Reporty rubbish
Real artists ship.
The problem though is that some things aren't shippable per say. How do you protect those?
Let's run through a few hypothetical examples:
-Let's say Intel develops a new manufacturing process that it currently doesn't use
-Let's say Apple develops a new motion sensor and depth detector algorithm or methodology, but doesn't use it yet
-Let's say a pharma creates a new manufacturing process for a widely used synthesis step, but doesn't use that step in any currently shipping products
-Let's say a pharma creates and patents a class of drugs that show promising results (we'll assume IND) but later it fails due to tox issues
In all of those cases, the company is not shipping or using it in a product currently. Does that make it invalid? No. The patent issue isn't such a black and white issue, and to make broad generalizations is borderline ignorance. Not everything can and will be shipping products, or will be used immediately in such. Thus is the way of inventions and technological development-- often not all of the pieces are in place at the same time. Often people forget about the investment into such discoveries as well-- taking a drug from IP to Phase 1 or 2 where it failed costs about $1bn. Here's another example: Bell labs did a lot of work in fiber optics post WWII; while their discoveries weren't patented courtesy of the US government's shortsightedness at the time, many of those advances weren't used in products outright for some time. Does that mean the patent would be invalid? Hardly.
EDIT: There's another flaw with the entire "patents are entirely bad" argument-- often they are based upon declarations of what seems "obvious," but often what's obvious now wasn't obvious back then. Methodology is valid grounds for patenting, and just because it seems trite today doesn't necessarily mean it was back then. The purview of hindsight is absolute. I'm not saying that these patents here are fine however, as they seem overtly broad, but if Apple licensed they must have some stand of validity, and that by no means implies that the patent system is "broken."
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