I was pointed towards this presentation by Jeff Han at TEDTalks today and here he talks about research into dual-touch user interfaces. Lots of talk about two finger guestures to zoom in/out etc pretty much what the iPhoner is supporting. And David Pogue in one his blog posts also mentions Jeff’s work with Jobs implying that Apples came first.
Now this would not be the first time that Apple has looked at research and assumed this as its own would it? So who came first, and how long has research been going on in this area. How do you get 200 patents on one product and just how many people have been working on patents just for the iPhone. Think how much more Apple could of done if they weren’t writing up 200 patents, believe it is a slow and resource intensive process. How much manpower was just consumed writing and pursuing patents, and now we wait for the lawyers to start trying to enforce them (assuming they get approved of course).
Musings in a wired world 
This isn’t a bash torwad Steve, but good entrepreneurs understand that even if something isn’t nessesaraly usefull, its worth patenting, because you never know how an idea can grow. Obviously alot of Steves patents were highly sucessfull, but i would also assume that a good 2/3rds of them are useless or obsoleted, and never made it into the market. I hold about 14 patents at the moment, and only three of them are actually in production and used in any sort of market. My point is, the high number of patents doesn’t nessesaraly show the brilliance of design intelect of an individual, as much as it shows their ability to understand that all ideas could potentially make money.