Re: Corporate evolution in action?
Er, you forgot to mention the ludicrous "rounded corners" case brought by Apple against Samsung, which is still rumbling along in several ways.
There is a big difference between SCO and BlackBerry/Oracle. SCO really didn't have a case at all, as was demonstrated at practically every stage of that crazy long running series of court appearances.
In contrast, BlackBerry have already been successful in defending their IPR in court, and may very well be in the new case against Avaya. It's some moderately substantial patents that they're attempting to enforce, and whilst they're not in the best of commercial health at the moment they're definitely not a Non Practising Entity. That have also lost and settled at least one case brought against them.
In Oracle vs Google it is not disputed that Google copied Oracle copyrighted material, and it's far from certain that Google will get away with it.
It is wholly reasonable that respectable companies should be able to defend their IPR. There absolutely has to be a level playing field for IPR, otherwise people will stop inventing it. And that's bad for the economy. As for losing an innovative edge with age, well that's just the way it goes. Spending a lot of money innovating means having to milk the resultant market for all its worth for as long as possible. Just because a company did all it's really cutting edge stuff a long time ago doesn't mean that it's no longer useful or profitable, nor should anyone be allowed to take it away from them.
I think that some tech companies have been, well, fairly reckless in their approach ignoring other company's IPR holdings. For instance, if Google end up losing a vast sum of money to Oracle over this case, the board members may have to personally justify the decisions they made a long time ago in court cases raised by their own shareholders. That kind of thing can become personally quite expensive in the US.
We may in years to come look back on the history of Google over the past few years and see the period as being an unwise collection of overly risky decisions. There's the various anti-trust cases with the EU that probably won't go Google's way. Their tax evasion practises will eventually force the US government into passing legislation that could end up costing Google and Apple and Amazon a lot of money. The way they lost control of Android in China is, I think, a massive mistake that has been masked by their current success and was entirely avoidable had their technological strategy been different (they just threw the Android source code over the wall without stopping to think whether it was a wise idea or not). By comparison tinkering around with self-driving cars (which will almost certainly prove fruitless) is trifling small change.