Capitalism is based on the premise of free markets and competition. If you have multiple companies competing with each other, then eventually a higher quality product will be produced. The problem with this is that massive corporations hate competition. They undermine their prices, it hurts their profits, and if they don't have a monopoly then they can't determine the price of a product. As a result, businesses do anything to maintain their control over a product. Namely, lawsuits.
Recently Apple brought a lawsuit against HTC, a maker of smartphones. Apple is claiming that HTC violated multiple patents of their iPhone. This lawsuit is less about battling HTC and more about fighting Google, whose Android operating system is used by HTC. By suing Google's affiliates in the phone industry, Apple is hoping to limit Google's spread into the smartphone industry.
A problem with this lawsuit is that similar smartphones have been around since before the birth of the iPhone. Companies like Palm and Synaptics are believed to hold multiple patents in the smartphone based industry. As a result, many of Apple's patents could be found invalid by the courts.
Visually speaking, both of these phones are very similar. They are both thin, portable, and use touch screen technology. Even their capabilities are similar. They can both surf the web, use GPS, are voice controlled, etc. As Henry Jenkins stated in "Convergence Culture" the hardware is diverging, but the software is converging. This is a perfect example. Both of these phones do basically the same thing, but by bring about this lawsuit, Apple is hoping to keep the hardware from diverging too quickly.
Works Cited:
The New York Times "Apple Sues Nexus One Maker HTC"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqHjvXdW6vE
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H8SC2sxifGc
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