I'll say the same thing there. Before iPhone, there were some tech demos here, there were some sorta kinda similar attempts at a feature there, there were some things that if you squint real hard you can say "Hey, maybe that was the inspiration for Apple." Then there was the iPhone.
There's an old cartoon, two scientists or engineers looking at a flowchart, and in the middle is a big blob with the label "And a miracle occurs". One of them says to the other, "I think you need to flesh that middle bit out a bit"
If your view of creation of the iPhone was "bits and pieces in the wild" leading to "and a miracle occurs" leading to "Apple introduces the iPhone", you really need to flesh that middle bit out a bit. It's not gather all the bits in a bucket, Steve Jobs says "Throw the switch!", Jon Ivy says "Yes, Master" and the lightning booms and there's an iPhone. There's a lot of long term, expensive work to go from the bits and pieces to a product. A lot of honing to decide "Yes, this is how people will expect it to work and this is how we make that happen". Apple spent many, many years, originally on a tablet and then switching to a phone to release it. This cost a lot of money. As the guy says at the start of part 3, if you have one guy pricing a product with manufacturing costs, development costs, and marketing costs, and another guy copies it so just has to do manufacturing and marketing costs - the second guy has a huge advantage. But he later throws all that out and all this IP stuff is just for the common good to put more stuff out there.
OK, let's talk common good. First, in a few years, all those patents will expire, and Google or Samsung can do whatever they want with them. That is, after all, how patents were to serve the common good - instead of trade secrets, people patent things, get exclusive use for a while, and then anyone gets it. But Google and Samsung want it NOW instead of waiting.
The next response could have been "Hey, you can do some cool things with these parts", go the the same bit bucket of parts as Apple went to, spent the years Apple did. There may be some that they come to the same conclusion that "this is the best way", but there's usually multiple approaches to take to things and Apple may not have always found the best way. So, Google and Samsung take the years to work with it and come up with something different, giving customers a real choice. But that would cost big bucks and take time, and Google and Samsung want it now.
So they copy it.
I am NOT a fan of the litigation. I really hope that Apple grabs this opportunity to create a standard deal along the lines of the deal they signed with microsoft - license the general gesture vocabulary and such at a reasonable price, mark a few things as iPhone's distinguishing characteristics like the bounce back, and a general agreement not to try to duplicate the look of the phones.
But the idea that there was nothing of value that Apple brought to the market in the iPhone, or that sudden spin on a dime the smartphone industry did to switch to multitouch phones with the same gestures and same general structure was completely coincidental to Apple's release is insane on the face of it. And if there is no benefit to Apple for spending the large sums and long development processes to create these breakthrough products - why do it?
