You're doing an admirable tap-dance to preserve your Google partisanship here. Apple may have acquired patents before this but I'm having a hard time finding support for your assertion that they're trolling with those alone. Or even applying them at all as part of their patent litigation, as raganwald has pointed out elsewhere.
Consider these patents cited in Apple's HTC complaint:
Steve Jobs and Scott Forestall are mentioned as inventors in some, and plenty more are attributed to one Bas Ording, who is a UI designer at Apple.
Even if fully half of Apple's patents in this complaint were acquired from an outside source, I have a hard time begrudging them their application of patent law in the protection of a business that makes a real product that required significant investment to create.
Who's doing the tap-dance? First I said that this was patent trolling:
> Purchases a patent, often from a bankrupt firm, and then sues another company by claiming that one of its products infringes on the purchased patent;
You disagreed, then I demonstrated that it was patent trolling. So, doing you little tap-dance, you're now saying that Apple never did that. Funny huh? As for the patents that Apple is suing HTC over, they are ridiculous just like any software patent as explained by many people (including Bill Gates and Larry Ellison) and others who pioneered modern computer science:
Regardless, Apple and Microsoft have been attacking other companies by using their patents, some which were bought and that, my friend, is patent trolling.
Consider these patents cited in Apple's HTC complaint:
http://techcrunch.com/2010/03/02/the-complaint-apples-patent...
Steve Jobs and Scott Forestall are mentioned as inventors in some, and plenty more are attributed to one Bas Ording, who is a UI designer at Apple.
Even if fully half of Apple's patents in this complaint were acquired from an outside source, I have a hard time begrudging them their application of patent law in the protection of a business that makes a real product that required significant investment to create.