An amazing amount of research, development, and human capital has gone into improving and advancing the cell phone. Today’s smartphone is a wondrous invention that scarcely resembles the early cell phones of two decades ago.

The investments that got us to the smartphone easily total in excess of $100 billion, if we account for the research and development spending of the smartphone manufacturers and their major suppliers. The awesome spending by some of the world’s largest companies make it inevitable that numerous intellectual property clashes have arisen, and these disputes have been so contentious that they have undoubtedly affected investment in information technology. For instance, the various conflicts over IP ownership among Apple, Google, Microsoft, and Samsung as well as several of their major suppliers and other industry stakeholders have continued unceasing for years, prodding each of these companies into spending billions of dollars to acquire troughs of patents merely to use as ballast for future patent litigations.