Remember the cold war, the arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union? Each side was amassing and developing more and more powerful nuclear weapons. Not that either side really expected that they would be used as one bomb was enough to destroy humanity. The point was never to use a weapon of mass destruction, only to have more and more powerful ones than the other side.

 

The same could have been said of the patent system.

 

Patents were, until recently, not unlike the nuclear warheads and ballistic missiles of the Cold War. Technology companies amassed them to show their technical and legal prowess, but they were not used as weapons. When a threatening competitor came up, their lawyers would threaten litigation, then sit down and compare their piles of destructive force, and then most often come up with a cross-licensing agreement.

 

Nobody really got hurt and the system worked very well to prevent new entrants which lacked the patent portfolio protection.

 

That was the status quo for many years until someone actually decided to go to thermonuclear war with his company’s patent portfolio.

 

Steve Jobs’ authorized autobiography reveals the Apple chief was willing to use all of Apple’s $40 billion (€29.2 billion) in cash to destroy Android. That explains why the Samsung Galaxy Tab incident went beyond a spat and why it was not, as many had expected, settled out of court. Cupertino launched its nuclear warhead with intent to destroy, not to intimidate.

 

It changed the world order. It took patent litigation to another level; to the ultimate level. It opened Pandora ’s Box.