There seems to be three dogs in this fight.  One one side, there are those who think it is long overdue that Apple started defending themselves against intellectual property theft.  On the other side is a group that believes Apple is acting like the new Microsoft by using the courts to try to intimidate any real competition to the iPhone.  Then there are those who believe that all technology companies have lost their minds and sold their souls by using patents as weapons.  Place me firmly in the third camp.

The patent battles have become ridiculous.  Apple and Nokia have been trading barbs over who infringed on who's patents for the past few months.  According to an article on CNet's News.com, Nokia claims that Apple infringed on seven Nokia patents "in virtually all of its mobile phones, portable music players, and computers."   I don't know who is right and who is wrong is this case, and I believe that patents are necessary to protect your company's technology, but the current state of patent litigation mania will only hurt one party: the consumer.

I have some personal experience with absurd patent lawsuits.  Many years ago, I worked for a company that developed internet kiosk hardware, software, and services.  Don't look for it, it's not there anymore.  Using Microsoft development platforms, we developed proprietary technology that allowed retailers to put kiosks in their stores that gave customers access to internet.  The technology we created locked the kiosk down to only being able to browse certain websites and kept customers from accessing pornography or other objectionable content from the kiosk.  It all sounds pretty simple now, but 12 years ago it was pretty hot.

One day our boss informed us that we were being sued for patent infringement by a competing company that supposedly had a patent on putting internet access in kiosks.  The company in question was all but bankrupt, and it was obvious that they were looking for a quick settlement for some cash to keep them going.  In fact, I'm not sure they even produced a product; they just held the patent for internet kiosks, or so they said.  The sad thing is that there are companies that do just that.  They don't make anything.  They just try to obtain as many patents as they can and sue, sue, sue.  What really made my blood boils was not the fact that we were being sued, but the fact that somebody thought that they could actually patent public internet access from a kiosk.  It just seems so obvious an invention.   I could see some merit to such a lawsuit if we had implemented the idea of an internet kiosk in the exact same way, but while my company created custom, proprietary computer programs to keep kiosk users limited to certain websites, the company that was suing us only put graphics over the address bar of the web browser.  Not only were the two implementations completely different, but their solution was lame as well.

In the end, the internet bubble burst and we all went out of business before the suit was ever resolved.  I never became an internet millionaire, but I was able to wallpaper my bathroom with the 30,000 shares of stock that was supposed to get me there.