Reminds me of GLOBAL THERMONUCLEAR WAR. Did no one run the simulations before firing off the first suit?

There's one difference: the lawyers win.

would you like to play a game?

Yeah it's called prisoner's dilemma. The strategy is called tit-for-tat. Bittorrent uses it to keep peers from misbehaving; look it up.

Here's a better visualization:

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2010/whos-suing-whom-i...

That's a great graphic. It incorporates a lot more information. I like George Kokkinidis' as well:

http://news.designlanguage.com/post/1252039209

Way cooler and way more immediate visual info that my GraphViz version. Nice job.

Made a GraphViz version of the diagram in the article. See

http://www.grok2.com/blog/2010/10/06/who-is-suing-who-in-the...

Seems like a lot of the Japanese companies are getting sued willy-nilly. Wonder why?

Several of those lawsuits have to do with LCD price-fixing, if I recall correctly.

So MS is suing Motorola, Motorola is suing Apple, Apple is suing HTC, Oracle is suing Google. Did I miss any?

Oh yes you did. Nokia is suing Apple which is suing Nokia.

For a full picture: http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Technology/Pix/pictures/...

What a great system we have. Those patents are most certainly ensuring innovation in the industry.

Well, the lawyers are doing well, anyway.

I wonder if this has anything to do with the suit by Microsoft. Maybe trying to win back the money it will use to settle? Or it found patents and then said -- hey, we can sue Apple .. Hooray!

They don't put something like this together in a couple of days. Further a part of the complaint is that they're been trying to muscle Apple into licensing but Apple has been non-compliant.

Really though, who would people expect to have the deepest, most fundamental patents? Motorola invented the mobile phone, and they've been doing fairly leading stuff since, not counting the past 3 years (when they got seriously off the tracks thanks to Windows Mobile).

I doubt Motorola is shaking too hard at Microsoft's lawsuit, and I doubt they'll pay a penny to settle that. They might put out a token Windows Mobile 7 phone, or alternately cross license patents.

This should all go away, though. Nonetheless, it's good to see Apple get hit because there's this growing meme that Apple invented everything, and they're the poor victim of everyone else's theft. It's a tired, baseless bit of nonsense.

This is getting insane.

And ridiculous, at this point they should all realize it's not a win-win for anyone and create an open patent pool of some sort not like mpegla but more like an open pool of patent they can use, sue anyone who has patents in it and everyone goes after you.