Opinions are like...
It's amazing how many people here who have opinions that, as far as I can tell, could not actually be held if they'd even bothered to read any of the articles that have popped up about this subject. (Or perhaps I underestimate peoples' ability to withstand cognitive dissonance?)
So, let's compare.
Apple:
Apple has a bunch of design patents on the iPhone, because, when they introduced it, there was nothing on the market that even vaguely resembled it. Thus, they were able to patent the design (it's a pity that design patents are even called patents, because they're much more similar to trade dress than they are to 'real' invention patents). Like it or hate it, this is the truth: the iPhone started everything rolling. Ditto, except somewhat less so, with the iPad.
There are now a bunch of companies that are trying to make something that looks and acts as close as possible to the way an iPhone or iPad does without violating those patents. Apple is suing them because *that's how you decide what is too close*. If Apple didn't sue anyone over them, then they would be free to take Apple's designs, copy them precisely, and undercut Apple on price (because they don't need to do anything hard like material science work, customer testing, OS design (Google does that for free), and because for *some* of them they're quite happy to cut corners on materials and quality, they can afford to price goods dramatically cheaper than Apple and still make a healthy profit.)
So the only way to establish where the line is, when a manufacturer is simply creating a clone of an iPhone vs. when they're just basing their design ideas on the look of an iPhone, is by lawsuit. This might make you uncomfortable. Perhaps you think that your own judgement would be a much more reasonable standard, and that all these companies should just pay you a million a year each to look at their phones and decide when a design is infringing or when it isn't, and then Apple wouldn't have to be a big meanie and sue someone. But guess what? That's not how the system works.
Now, Motorola:
In the early days of cell phones, Motorola did a whole bunch of research and came up with ideas on how they thought cell phones should work. Those ideas were patented, and so when Motorola suggested that they be incorporated in a standard, they were told that their licensing terms must be fair and reasonable. Because otherwise Motorola could dominate the industry: just wait say 5 years for the standard to fully take hold, and then announce that you're charging 25% royalties for the patents. Then mark your phones down to cost, and sue anyone who doesn't comply, and watch all your competitors go out of business, because they need to charge 40% more than you do: part to pay you your royalty, which is where you make your money since you're not making any on your handset, and the other part to actually make a profit. Result? In a few years, only Motorola is making handsets. And if someone figures out how to make a profit, you just raise their royalties to 50%, or 100%, or 150% for that matter.
So Motorola agrees to FRAND (although possibly they didn't? reports seem unclear on this point. If they didn't, then it was utterly insane for the standards body to allow this), and so do another thirty or so companies that hold patents on cell-phone-related technologies. And everyone has basically similar patent terms, which means that when new players want to get into the game, there isn't this group that have cross-licensed patents that can conspire to keep them out.
And then Apple comes along, and suddenly Motorola wants 2.5% (or 2.25%?) of the sale price of everything cell-related that Apple sells. Now, even discounting the fact that this is almost certainly an order of magnitude more than Motorola gets from anyone else, imagine this: every company in that thirty or so that hold essential patents on cell phone technologies owns something that Apple MUST USE in order to make the iPhone. Basically, they're all non-optional. So there's no reason to say that any one is a lot more important than any other one. In fact, at least in some cases, it's not even a technical requirement (which can sometimes be worked around)... it's a requirement imposed by the standards body itself.
So, what if each one of them wants 2.5%? Why shouldn't Qualcomm get 2.5% if Motorola does? After all, both of them hold patents without which it is impossible to make a cell phone.
So, then, 30 x 2.5% is 75%. So Apple's royalties are 75% for every cell phone. And these are the patents that are *required* to make a cell phone. Now, would that, do you think, be considered fair, reasonable, and non-discriminatory? Do you honestly think that all the other cell phone companies pay 75% of the end price of their units to all the other companies? Or perhaps you mean 'non-discriminatory' to include 'Apple pays a higher percentage than anyone else'? And as for 'reasonable', that seems pretty laughable to me.
But I guess it's a lot easier to reconcile if you are simply someone who must find fault with Apple in anything it does. After all, if you were to only go after Apple when they were in the wrong (which happens plenty often), then they might start to fix the things that are wrong with them. And the Apple haters would loathe that, because it would leave them with less and less to criticize, which is awful if a substantial portion of your ego rests on hating a corporation. (Which is a pretty entertaining phenomenon in itself.) Fortunately, they have stumbled upon an answer: if a loud minority of the population criticizes Apple for everything they do all the time, then Apple will ignore all of that criticism, treating it as noise, and correcting very little.
Isn't that nice?
