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Re:Nokia suing Apple over the iPhone by antonovka on Thursday October 22, 2009 @02:33PM (#897350)
If there were no patents, Apple would have no financial incentive (and that's the only incentive public companies have) to invest so heavily in all of the technologies in the iPhone, as they could easily be copied by others.

No financial incentive other than, you know, a need to compete in order to sell their product? It's not as if you can just photocopy a phone and wind up with the software written and hardware designs necessary to reproduce it -- and if you can, how novel are the ideas?

It's disingenuous to state that Apple relied on Nokia's IP (that they would have otherwise kept trade secret), especially given that it's almost certain that Apple engineers ignored existing patents as much as possible when developing the iPhone to avoid additional liability.

Re:Nokia suing Apple over the iPhone by DougBTX on Thursday October 22, 2009 @08:31PM (#898016)
It's disingenuous to state that Apple relied on Nokia's IP

Unless there is any truth in the "we got our patents into industry standards which Apple supports" line from the article.

Re:Nokia suing Apple over the iPhone by andreyf on Thursday October 22, 2009 @09:27PM (#898083)
No financial incentive other than, you know, a need to compete in order to sell their product?

There are many ways to compete and sell products. Investing as much money as Apple does into R&D is only financially reasonable with government guaranteed monopolies in place. Do you seriously have any doubt that Apple would spend less money on R&D if they weren't able to patent their discoveries? Would any of their products be possible without such extensive R&D spending?