UPDATE: Apple has responded to the issue below with a letter, which offers no legal protection to app developers.
The U.S. Patent and copyright regimes have evolved to benefit corporations.
That was not their original intent (it was meant to benefit small inventors like this guy), but that's discussion for another time.
For now let's focus on reality. Patents and copyrights are meant to benefit big companies. They're treated as property rights, especially in fast-moving industries. Big outfits like Apple, Google and Microsoft raise high the patent walls, buying rights to inventions they didn't create and then asserting them against their ecosystems, in order to maintain control.
Apple has done this with special ruthlessness, but now a patent troll called Lodsys (and sorry guys but you're a troll) has hoisted it on its own petard.
Lodsys bought an incredibly broad patent, number 10,732,102 for those scoring at home claiming to cover all purchases within applications, when the upgrade process is part of the app.
The “invention” was created by a man named Dan Abelow (above), in 1988, so the actual invention has nothing to do with mobile phones, apps, or anything in the current day. He sold his rights to Nathan Myrhvold's Intellectual Ventures in 2004
Lodsys got its “rights” from Intellectual Ventures. So this is not a case of small inventor getting his just desserts, even second hand. This is a law firm shaking down an industry for its own profit.
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