[Swordmaker]

“"In sum, Apple is engaging in a practice now called “efficient infringement,” which is increasingly common today, especially among high-tech giants like Apple and Google. This occurs when a company chooses to infringe another’s patents given its calculation that it will pay less money in a court-ordered judgment than in a properly negotiated license agreement—after years of fighting the patent owner in court and before regulatory tribunals at the Patent Office and after forcing the patent owner to pay millions in legal fees. Too often, companies like Apple really think they can just get away with infringing others’ patent rights because they have the resources to outlast patent owners in these legal challenges."

Unlike Microsoft which has always used this practice from its founding, Apple has always attempted to license or own the IP it uses, not steal it. The case your linked article uses in prime is the Qualcomm case which in every case brought around the world in many venues, Apple has won. Apple sued Qualcomm due to their insistence on charging royalties on the entire completed device instead of the industry standard practice of charging royalties only on the components that Qualcomm provides that are included in that device. Qualcomm also ignores the concept of patent exhaustion, which holds that once they’ve sold their product, a chip, to a company which incorporates into their final product and its functionality, Qualcomm’s patent is exhausted and its royalty has been satisfied. Qualcomm demands royalties on the subsequent full value of every device their product is ever installed in. For example, if a 25¢ Qualcomm chip is installed in a $25 billion aircraft carrier, even though the function of the Qualcomm chip remains the same, Qualcomm demands the same percentage of the value of that aircraft carrier as they do for a $16 Android phone with the same chip in it. That is why Apple was suing Qualcomm. AppleID won in every venue in the world and only settled here in the US when Intel dropped out of the 5G development race.

[Pelham]

“Unlike Microsoft which has always used this practice from its founding, Apple has always attempted to license or own the IP it uses, not steal it.”

That’s laughable. “Efficient infringement” is nothing but a euphemism for patent theft and Apple has been one of the prime drivers of it.

Apple got a big boost in this when Obama appointed a corporate attorney for one of Apple’s fellow efficient infringers as the head of the patent office.

Fortunately Trump’s choice to head the USPTO is cleaning house and trying to restore America’s standing as a defender of patents, instead of being the enabler of massive theft by the world’s richest corporations.

With any luck SCOTUS will help this along by driving a stake through the kangaroo court created during Obama, the Patent Trial and Appeals Board, which has acted as the getaway driver for the efficient infringement thieves.

Once again it will require an Article III court to take away property, instead of an administrative body filled with corrupt hacks who routinely violate the protections offered by a real court.