Look how many ideas APPLE patents and has done nothing with. They came up with the idea, they patented it basically putting on record that it's their idea. Then someone else comes along does the same thing and gets sued by Apple.
YOU WOULD BE CHEERING FOR APPLE . and rightfully so. It was their idea.
Please point out an instance where Apple has surreptitiously filed for a patent on an idea (ie, one that would not become highly public knowledge the moment it was filed), never developed a concrete product based on that idea, and then prosecuted a third party for infringing on it.
Anything?
Didn't think so.
If this guy truly developed that and got a patent for it, then APPLE and all those companies HAVE been using his property without any kind of pay.
It's not that cut and dry. For a patent to be valid it must be proven a large enough leap from prior art that no one else would likely have come up with it themselves. The problem is that the patent law system places absolutely none of this burden of proof on the patent filer (aside from a hit-and-miss system of cursory "peer" review, you could file a patent for breathing in Oxygen and expelling CO2 and would stand a pretty good chance of it going through), and all of the burden on the patent "violator". This is why most places roll over for patent trolls: it is a lot cheaper to just pay the guy something than to pay a team of lawyers three times as much to prove that you don't owe him anything
and if you pay off the patent troll then the next company (ie, your competition) has a higher burden of proof to achieve.
Just because he took so long to bring it to court doesn't make APPLE's and all the others' actions any less illegal.
It's important to keep terms straight here. Patent violation is not "illegal" in the common sense; it is a patent violation. This may seem a small detail, but "illegal" acts pertain to things which are against the law, which will generally be prosecuted in the public's interest; patent violations are a civil matter, and rarely as cut-and-dry as legal violations tend to be.
One major thing to note that charges of illegality here in the US are "innocent until proven guilty"; civil charges such as patent violations are "guilty until proven innocent".
As far as the wheel thing... if one guy thought it up and a guy on the other side of the world started producing it, well it was still the first guy's idea no matter how far away they were. They weren't far enough away that the second guy couldn't hear of the idea from the first guy.
or
If the second guy came up with the very same idea on his own without knowledge of the first guy and did something with it, that's very different. Cases have been won in favor of someone who came up with the same idea later without previous knowledge of the first idea.
Ummm ... that second case is very explicitly what was posited, thus the "on the other side of the world". The Internet didn't exist when the wheel was invented (although, to be fair, neither did patent law

)
Specifically with patent law, there is a burden on the second guy to prove that he came up with the idea on his own and not as a result of hearing about the first guy's idea.