Jobs Announces HTC War

“ We can sit and wait for our competitors to steal our own inventions, and we can do something. We decided to do something ,” says Jobs.

Only a few months ago there was a story with Nokia . Now Apple decides to sue HTC for violation of more than 20 (!) Patents related to the UI, architecture and hardware of the iPhone .
Further, according to Jobs, " We love competition. True! But we would like to see competitors create their new solutions, but not steal ours ."
Here's the question: to the stake? : Why is it necessary to allow patents to be registered “on the air” and hinder the development of other companies and the industry as a whole?
Yes, I'm not a fan of Apple . So it happened. And let me at least 24/7 inspire how good and beautiful is the same iPhone from Apple - well, I can’t see functionality in it. Gentlemen - and these are no longer emotions - this is reality.
And here's another thing: we are witnessing the end of the world accomplished facts. Any knowledge, technology should belong to people in the end, like aspirin, for example. I'm not saying that everything is open and distributed on the street. This is different. Take at least the GNU GPL. Well, you can not create a large and bright world, closing the obvious technology, such as multitouch, for example.
And what do you think? Is it possible today to build an effective business, closing patents all that is possible?

upd 1: HTC: “in general, we only learned from articles that Apple wants to do something with us there. We have been working on the market for 13 years and always invent new technologies ourselves and protect our patents. ”

upd 2: Apple claimed 700 (!) application pages and the following HTC devices: Nexus One, Touch Pro, Touch Diamond, Touch Pro2, Tilt II, Pure, Imagio, Dream / G1, myTouch 3G, Hero, HD2 and Droid Eris
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via engadget