[cuban leaf]

I worked for a large cell phone company and supported their legal department. There are people out there that will reverse engineer a cell phone and try to identify parts of its functionality that are not patented. They will then patent it and then sue the company for violating their patent.

We had a whole subsection of our legal department devoted to dealing with this crap.

The wright bro’s tried to patent flying.

[circlecity]

"There are people out there that will reverse engineer a cell phone and try to identify parts of its functionality that are not patented. They will then patent it and then sue the company for violating their patent."

While I have no doubt there are those who try this, any such patent they obtain would be invalid on the basis of the "Prior art" doctrine.

[calex59]

The wright bro’s tried to patent flying.

Their patent claims were mostly against Curtis, because he used ailerons to control his turns, and they claimed he usurped their wing warping method. While they both accomplished the same thing, they are not identical and I think their claim was wrong and arbitrary(I believe they eventually lost the claim).

They spent so much time in patent fights that they lost out on aircraft sales and on chances to improve their aircraft.

[MaxMax]

There are people who will take new inventions and patent a similar idea
then sue the original patent holder. That's how they make a living, and most
who do this are Patent attorneys who can hold out and file indefinitely pro-bono.