For a number of years, the “smartphone wars” have been blamed, at least in part, for causing a broken and chaotic patent system.
These cries of crisis reached their peak in the summer of 2012, when Judge Posner, sitting by designation, ruled in one of the then pending Apple v. Motorola cases, and, as reported by the New York Times, observed that “[t]here’s a real chaos” in the patent system. In reporting on patent litigation between Apple, Samsung, Motorola, Microsoft, HTC, and others—i.e., the smartphone wars—the New York Times further recounted views of industry participants that the patent system is “so flawed that it often stymies innovation,” and that it is “corrupted by software patents used as destructive weapons.
This article addresses whether the so-called smartphone wars provide a basis for these continuing cries of alarm, or if they ever did.