The Economist writes about
Smart-phone lawsuits ~ The great patent battle noting that "nasty legal spats between tech giants may be here to stay"...
"This orgy for lawyers is partly a result of the explosion of the market for smart-phones. IDC, a market-research firm, expects that 270m smart-phones will be sold this year: 55% more than in 2009. “It has become worthwhile to defend one’s intellectual property,” [...] 
Yet there is more than this going on. Smart-phones are not just another type of handset, but fully-fledged computers, which come loaded with software and double as digital cameras and portable entertainment centres. They combine technologies from different industries, most of them patented. Given such complexity, sorting out who owns what requires time and a phalanx of lawyers. The convergence of different industries has also led to a culture clash. When it comes to intellectual property, mobile-phone firms have mostly operated like a club. They jointly develop new technical standards: for example, for a new generation of wireless networks. They then license or swap the patents “essential” to this standard under “fair and reasonable” conditions. [...] Not being used to such a collectivist set-up, Apple refused to pay up, which triggered the first big legal skirmish over smart-phones."
That's just great. The prime profits from smart phones are made by... the lawyers.
I'm with Shakespeare here.
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