If it's a patent that they own and someone else wants to use it, then why shouldn't they make money off of it? HTC can create their own solution if they want.

Related: read.bi/msandroid This is why the patent system needs to be alleviated.

@Paaet Ideas are cheap and general. Execution and products are valuable and concrete. Patents were created to protect inventors from big companies from stealing their ideas. Instead they add to the coffers of monopolies like Microsoft.

Here's what hackers, the innovators in software, think of software patents: news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2552740

Plus it means the phone cost 5 dollars more. :)

shorter patent time makes sense. Open source has learned to make money on the support side not on the software side.

It seems to me that David vs. Goliath sensibilities are interfering with critical thinking. @crizCraig your first post doesn't really do anything to support your assertion... it's just informative. Your second doesn't help much too. Since the word hacker came into the modern paradigm they've been against software patenting, at least until they go legit.

I especially don't agree with the ideas are cheap thing whatsoever. It's so counterintuitive. It would be like me saying who needs sperm and ova when we have people.

Beyond that, I am willing to bet a my left testicle that if we substituted some of the proper nouns in this argument your opinion would shift. First, I bet if we switched microsoft and google, your position would do the same. I also believe if a regular dude was enforcing his patent via litigation everyone would be on his side.

This comes down to the point where one might argue corporation vs. individual. A topic I am very sore about, but in the terms of Intellectual Property I am not. If a company like microsoft could battle for it'sIP, then the small guys couldn't either get a job there developing thus feeding their families and making their lives comfy or develop on their own and sell to a large interest. Either way the IP is what is being transferred and the rights of the owner need to be unilateral.

It's not about David & Goliath, Microsoft vs. Google, or any regular dude. I think patents should be abolished period. When you create products, you have to come up with thousands of good ideas, with hard work and time put into refining the ideas and coming up with new ones all the time. If someone "steals" your original idea, even a big company, and does it better than you, then everyone wins, except you. Because what they actually did was have a lot of good ideas that you didn't and put work into making those ideas valuable to other people.

So, it should be okay for big companies to steal anyone's ideas?

Yes. Why not? Ultimately, whoever creates the best product should win.

They absolutely should get a share of the profits if the technology they invented is being used as the basis for the new unaffiliated product. I can't just add a verse to Stairway to Heaven and call it my song.