Old article, but I just never got around to writing analysis, so here it finally is:
Business is funny, isn’t it? If you and your neighbor were feuding over a fence on the property line, you probably wouldn’t go to them and ask for sugar and flour so you could bake cookies. Of course if you run a bakery and your neighbor is your chief supplier of flour and sugar… why would you sue them? Answer: Because your neighbor just started making cookies themselves. Now you have competition. Apple wants Samsung to stick to supplying the flour and leave the baking to Apple. Plus, Samsung has baked some pretty good cookies (Gallaxy SII and Galaxy Nexus). Their recipe is similar to yours, but uses semi-sweet chocolate chips instead of milk chocolate. You believe that they stole the recipe from you and are in violation of your intellectual rights. Thing is, nobody owns the rights to baked goods. Just because you made a great new recipe doesn’t mean everybody owes you money every time a grocery store sells Oreo’s.
