Something of a straw man when speaking of paying off people who are long dead, versus people are were actively trying to get their products to market at the same time as you.<p>You also assume that there is an alternative to having arbitrary subsets. We&#x27;re dealing with the law, which is almost by definition an imperfect compromise that we put up with simply because it&#x27;s better than the alternative.<p>Kind of like how some people are arbitrarily thrown in jail, under the same legal system. Without rambling, I feel like you are just assuming an impossible and nonexistent counterfactual.<p>Furthermore, in this case, we aren&#x27;t talking about paying off the guy who set up the sewer system 100 years ago, we&#x27;re talking about paying off the people who had a patent 7 years before you, and you decided to say &quot;screw them&quot; and use it anyways. As if Apple didn&#x27;t know it was violating those patents? Come on. Why should companies be allowed to operate outside of the system we, as a society, set up?