 This past Friday, Apple won its lawsuit against Samsung for patent infringement both on the iPhone and the iPad. Basically, Apple had argued that Samsung had copied the basic design of the phone as well as many of sort of the user features like the scrolling and tap to zoom and things like that on the phone and a jury found that in fact Samsung had infringed on those patents and awarded Apple damages in the range of a billion dollars. And then in general I mean it's sort of a kind of a warning signal to other firms that make smartphones that you have to be very careful with how you design your phone or you could end up in a similar infringement lawsuit and what that ultimately means for consumers is higher costs because you have to invest a lot more in things like researching patents and prior art and sort of doing your sort of due diligence. But also somewhat sort of diminished innovation because if I'm a new firm or someone who's out there who's trying to create a new phone I've got to go through all that process. I've got to you know jump through these hoops and then I've got to worry about whether or not I'm going to get sued by Apple and so it's got sort of a two down size in terms of really potentially raising costs for consumers as well as I think hurting you know kind of innovation down the road with new firms and new innovators. Some of the arguments that you hear from supporters of patents and particularly software patents is that it actually spurs more innovation. I think that's pretty debatable if you look in particular at software patents they really build, innovation kind of builds on innovation and the actual lawsuit itself what found, what they found Samsung infringing upon were things like the outline of the case you know having a rectangle with rounded edges that's that was part of the what the jury found Samsung infringed upon the idea of you know pinch and zoom. You know those are sort of you know very sort of generic patents almost and the fact that they you know they're you know it's hard to say that they were truly original. In fact you know one of the misconceptions about the iPhone itself was this notion that Apple just sort of created it out of thin air and really was the first to come up with it and and that's just not true. In fact there's this great TED talk by Kirby Ferguson talking about everything as a remix and he goes into detail about you know multi-gesture touchscreens and just how much you know how there have been a decade of innovation happening and really Apple was sort of just at the right time at the right place and was able to sort of shrink it into this form factor that we have as the iPhone but there was really nothing dramatically original about it and in fact it built on a lot of other innovations to get to the iPhone and so you know and really a lot of technology and software follows that kind of innovation path where it's really innovations building on innovations building on innovations and the the you know the benefit to consumers is you know how you package that together and sort of a product itself. So whether or not this sort of ruling was actually a surprise is it probably isn't you know the the patent wars between Microsoft, Google and Apple have been sort of ramping up and over time and it's really been kind of a way for Apple to sort of really kind of protect its market share. I mean we have to remember that patents really are a government-enforced monopoly and you know as as Apple as the first innovator out of the gate is really seeking to protect its market share and prevent sort of competition and so I would expect that you know we will continue to see these types of lawsuits going forward and the problem in the end with sort of I think it highlights then a larger issue of our patent laws in general and whether or not they're actually suited to software and technology innovation and the way that they might be better suited towards pharmaceuticals and others where you have a very clear patent for a drug or what have you rather than a patent on sort of the form function of an iPhone or you know some sort of certain feature. I mean it's interesting to think about you know Apple going back to sort of Apple's beginnings you know with Steve Jobs in the early 80s. If Xerox which was the company that first designed the graphical user interface had all the innovations with clicking on folders and all that if they had actually patented those type of innovations I don't think Apple would have gotten off the ground in the early 80s because they would have been faced with the massive lawsuit from Xerox and you know would that young company have actually survived to not just create Macs but you know 20 years later the iPhone. So you know I think for broader the broader public and sort of broader society that you know there's concern of whether or not the patent system actually is beneficial to supporting innovation and development particularly if you're a new firm that's trying to create new products of just dealing with all of the potential for lawsuits, lawyer fees and so forth that resulted that and the other issue is just the cost. Again that raises the cost for each device if you've got a factor in you know paying for lawsuits or paying for all this research on prior art and negotiating that those thickets.