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Originally Posted by Erick Estrada
Easy to say but no proof at all to back up.
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Quote:
Originally Posted by sclitheroe
No real evidence of that - everything is getting progressively cheaper, or more capable for the same price.
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Actually there is and it has to do with the IP related costs as a percentage of a cell phone price. The more IP costs the producer, the more the costs are passed to the consumer as a cost of doing business. Business have to maintain a certain margin to have products become economically viable. If the cost is too high the project will not get approval during the Business Opportunity Assessment. Right now the consumer pays 15-20% the selling price of a cell phone in patent costs because of litigation. More on this here.
http://www.economist.com/node/17309237
Historically this was at close to 10% a decade earlier, what will it be in the next decade given this sort of litigation? I'd say we're looking at a increase given the overall increase in the rate of litigation... 25-30% is possible and not unreasonable. Given Apple is asking for a $30 license fee and the costs of the license fees will be passed directly onto the consumer as an additional cost of doing business. At a 15%(conservative) of $699 (SGSII MSRP) the consumer pays ~$105 in legal costs. Passing the additional $30 fee on to the consumer we now pay $135 on a $739 cell phone or 18%, 3% more than you originally had to pay in unseen legal fees. Without all this litigation you'd be even paying less for your goods. Litigation is extremely bad from a consumer perspective because of increased Cost of Goods or COGs (or limitation of consumer choice through cancelled projects) and taxes you pay for the courts to run these court cases that could be much better spent, I don't know... prosecuting some felons for example.
So yes, litigation = real harm to consumers not in the future but right now, its going up even more given the precedent set by this case encouraging more litigious behaviour and there's plenty of proof if you bother to look.