It is sad to observere that patentbased lawsuits against competitors seems to be part of major mobile manufacturers business strategy these days. They have started to bang each other in the head using lawyers equipped with patents.
Nokia sues Apple, who sues HTC on UI technology. They've started to dig trenches instead of trying to beat the competion by innovating. High profile lawsuits like this require a lot of attention from the companies leaders, that distract them from making real business decisions. Especially Apple seems to have already forgotten about how fast they've recently grown in the smartphone market, only because they where innovative (and maybe already had a cool reputation). Well these times seems to have passed, and they've started to protect their innovations.
What Apple and Nokia is forgetting here is that this will force competion to do something uniquely new. Somewhere someone will come up with innovations making the iPhone look outdated. Innovation in this space often happens outside the big corporations, and this is becoming particularly true nowadays. The cloud offer startups vast computing resources, open source provide building blocks to start with and finally social media gives rapid feedback. No patent can protect an investment from this. See more on this here https://sites.google.com/a/webstep.no/openinnovation/Home/news-about-open-innovation/guykawasakioninnovationandthemythoflightningboltinspiration
I think patents in software is an anomaly that must be burried and forgotten. They can not help protect software investments, and only gives the patent grantees a false feeling of safety.
This week a new way of doing UI, Skinput, was presented, and that from the patent borg in Redmond, or at least a Microsoft driven University. I guess this will be patented too since it is a Microsoft-led innovation, but nevertheless it comes from a "unexpected" source, as Microsoft has lately been accused of not innovating much
Update: Very interesting podcast on the Techrepublic on this subject
Update 12.03.2010: Some very interesting and relevant blogposts:
The New Paradigm of Advantage and Jonathan Schwartz on Patent Litigation
