Your story is interesting but your language clearly shows how it has affected your view on things - you refer to your competitors, who did nothing more than compete with you exactly as one expects in a free marketplace as "cheating", "stealing", "copying" etc. You assume that you have a natural ownership of any idea that enters your head just because you decide to expend effort into researching it.

Have you thought about how your own idea was almost certainly founded on an existing industry full of players who saw you doing 99% copying and 1% something new? This seems to happen all the time - Apple creates a smartphone, using all the "R" that Blackberry, Microsoft, Palm and others did beforehand to inform their design decisions, and then because they add a small layer of newness they are completely blind to what they themselves "copied" in making their product. Everything others imitate is "stolen" while everything they use was "obvious". They completely discount all the risks competitors faced, all the innovation in the competitor's products (Jobs saw only a touch display with rounded icons - despite Android being incredibly innovative in its own right and introducing many features and concepts not seen elsewhere).

Look buddy, I am not going to go into every single detail of what my life was like during that period. Let's just say that you can't --and should not-- reach such conclusions from the very limited view I chose to share with you in a short post. I am condensing over a decade worth of experiences into a few paragraphs.

Here's a short one. Imagine this: A competitor asks you to meet, under NDA, to discuss licensing your product. "Can you build one for us with these features?" is the theme of the meeting. After lawyers do their thing, NDA's and other documents are in place, the meetings get started. These are deep technical meetings with information being shared for the purpose of developing a licensed product. Then, the talks end abruptly with no communication from the other side. Six months later they show-up at the next tradeshow with the very product you helped them understand, explore, diagram and almost get to market.

Here's another one: You hire a consultant to design a product for you. The consultant doesn't really know the field but he is capable. You, effectively, pay this person to learn on the job and design a widget for you. He does. Then, a few months later, after having learned the technical bits and also about the market opportunity, he launches a company with a competing product for less. You, effectively, paid for the "R" in "R&D". All he had to do was the "D".

These are not hypothetical situations. These actually happened.

99% copying and 1% something new?

Have you ever competed in anything? Say, swimming. Do you know how hard it is to get 1% better than world class? How about building a race car that is 1% better? C'mon, all you have to do is copy 99% of the design and then improve only 1% of it. Go do it and then come back and tell me how trivial it is to innovate just 1% of something already at the state of the art. I don't know one person who goes through such and experience that would make the kinds of comments you made.

Let's all hold hands, sing kumbaya and smoke one. Right.

First, I apologize for being somewhat presumptuous - clearly this was a very distressing and unfortunate series of events where your legitimate interests were harmed in pretty shady ways.

The only thing I'd add is that from what you've described, you would / should have had perfectly good legal redress completely independent of patents. The kinds of problems you describe would normally be addressed through contract and trade secrets law - presumably you had NDAs, contracts that protected your interests with contractors, etc. If those didn't work or you didn't have the resources to follow them through then I'm not sure you can presume patents would have been different.

No worries. I understand that it is hard to communicate or see both sides of something through this medium.

Legal action is a funny thing. I get the sense that people think that it's easy, that in the US it's as easy as making a phone call and you've got a lawsuit.

The reality, in my experience, is quite different. In business at least, it's part of the arms race. Can you sue a multi-billion dollar corporation for violating an NDA? Absolutely. The very first thing you lawyer will require is a $250,000 "war chest" and a demonstrable means to be in it for twice that much. It's a game you cannot win even if the truth is on your side.

That's another misconception of my youth that got washed away with a bucket of ice-cold water. You don't necessarily win because you are on the right side of an argument.

I'll give you another example. I had a case where my most valuable reseller, a company with great standing in the industry, was effectively bribed by said multinational corporation to exclude our products from their exhibit at a trade show. I have copies of the emails between employees of the company and the CEO of the reseller outfit. Could I sue? Sure. Was there potential for federal antitrust action. Very likely. Was I on the right side of the issue? Without a doubt. Was I guaranteed a win? Absolutely not. The more likely outcome would have been that seeking legal action would have ruined my business in more ways than one.

Don't get me wrong, I've taken legal action when justified and, more importantly, the "army's" were reasonably matched. In other cases you sometimes have to lick your wounds and move on.

This is the kind of stuff they don't teach you about in school. I can't say that I am grateful to have learned it this way because it is a shitty way to learn things, but sometimes there's no other way. I am still a very enthusiastic entrepreneur with multiple projects cooking. Life is good.

Interesting story, but the "I am not taking sides" is a plain lie.

That's not fair. He's not taking sides in the Apple vs. Samsung case. He has a valid opinion about the validity of the patent system, but that doesn't mean that patents should always be upheld. He's just sharing his experience (though it doesn't really have much bearing on the original post either).

OK, the problem with your argument is this bit: "Eight months later competitors came out with devices offering about 60% of what we were doing at half the price. It nearly killed the business"

If the HTC G1 "nearly killed" the iPhone 3G, then you might have an argument. Though it would depend in sensitive ways on things like whether or not Apple had made back its R&D costs over the year of Insanely Great iPhone sales. (The fact that that phone wasn't made by Samsung seems kinda important too).

Needless to say, Apple made out sorta OK under the Google/HTC onslaught of '08/90. So why cite something like this as a related anecdote when it clearly doesn't apply? The kind of damages you posit don't exist, so why sue to recoup them?

"If the HTC G1 "nearly killed" the iPhone 3G, then you might have an argument."

He's not really arguing that and admits ignorance of Apple vs whoever. He's arguing for the legitimacy of the patent system itself.

Moreover why would his anecdote of 8 months suddenly become a hard and fast rule that can be applied to all other industries after which all bets are off?

Because they would have made even more money otherwise?

I am not, in any way, proposing that my example or timeline is equivalent to what it going on with Apple vs. Samsung.

Mine is just one example of a real-life situation where someone got royally shafted for not having patent protection. I had major multinational corporation copying my designs, marketing materials, and more. I even had customers asking me if I had gone into a joint venture or licensing agreement with some of these competitors because of how blatant the copying had been. One or two patents would have stopped a lot of this on its tracks. Of course, part of the "business is war" aspect of things is whether or not you have enough of a financial war-chest to engage in litigation.

One of the reasons I did not go and file for a couple of patents was my natural drive, as an engineer, to just want to build it. Second was my stupid idealism at the time. I truly believed that if I just built a better product I'd always be ahead of the pack, even if they attempted to copy my work. I would later learn hard lessons when facing the consequences of these dumb, stupid decisions.

Keep in mind that I have huge problems with the patent system. I have read through hundreds of patents. Most of them are pure unrefined manure. Bullshit patents. And, yes, I felt that some aspects of the patents I was going to file for where bullshit.

I came out of school with this dumb-ass idealistic idea that makes a distinction between true invention and implementation. Engineers solve problems and implement solutions every day. These are not patentable inventions. True inventions are, non-obvious, blah, blah, blah. What a shock was it to discover that the patent office willingly hands off patents for implementation, not invention. Hell, they don't even do that, they are handing you patents for ideas, you know, the shit you are not supposed to be able to patent!

If you read through hundreds of patents and are intimately familiar with both the subject matter as well as the industry to which these patents are relevant it doesn't take long to realize that people are getting patents for napkin ideas as opposed to true realized invention.

And, don't get me started on software patents. I bet that if you were creative enough you could get a patent on the "do" loop, even today.

Boldly armed with all of this baggage and idealistic bullshit I trotted forward and built my product without filing for a single patent. It didn't take long to learn the lesson that was waiting for me around the corner.

Patents, like them or not, have become weapons of the war business can be. I can count with one hand the people I would trust without solid legal paperwork (be it patents or other instruments). I have been shafted by people who singed NDA's and then went out and used what they learned from me to go raise funding and become a competitor.

Again, its' "D" vs "R&D". They must have sounded like geniuses in front of the investors with all the product and market knowledge they stole from me. Thankfully, in that case, they ended-up failing miserably (not before causing me some financial pain) because of the fact that they had no knowledge or insights of their own. You can only go so far without a real connection to what you are doing.

I see this Apple vs. Samsung thing both ways. As I said before, I don't know who's right or wrong and don't have the time to figure it out. We'll see what happens.