Comment by ThePherocity

Well, absolutely, Samsung is leveraging Google's, and many companies R&D. But R&D isn't cheep, intuitive, or obvious. Blackberry decided not to copy Apple very much, still created some great phones from a product view and they died. Nokia copied not at all, and they're not doing too well. HTC copied a little, and they are doing okayish. Samsung copied a lot more and is doing the best. My argument is all ideas should be free. We should adopt the good ideas globally so every phone copies the best ideas. You get an inventors monopoly for as long as it takes to reverse engineer. In our current product cycles, that's ~2+years. All problems solved.