Apple-Samsung Case Shows Smartphone as Legal Magnet

The smartphone in your hand is a marvel of innovation, packing sophisticated computing and communications technologies into a sleek digital device. It is also a litigation magnet. In the last few years, the companies in the smartphone industry have spent billions of dollars buying patents and hundreds of millions suing one another. The Apple-Samsung case underscores how dysfunctional the patent system has become. Patent litigation has followed every industrial innovation, whether it is steam engines, cars, phones or semiconductors, but the smartphone wars are bigger, global and unusually complex. And it is the courts, rather than the patent office, that are being used to push companies toward a truce. In the end, consumers may be the losers.