I am all for all inventions must eventually become a commodity. However, if you look at the long term instead of just getting innovation to become cheap commodities available to everybody as soon as possible, some protection should be provided to the inventor so while cool new progressive "stand on the shoulders of giants" changes can keep coming, risky groundbreaking innovations can also emerge once in a while. Without effective patent protection, everybody will resort to do safer small-step improvements instead of spending years and billions to build (and market) something vastly different from what people are familiar with. In other words, with zero patent protection, you will still see cars getting better mileage, but you won't see an electrical car.
If we want to argue for patent reform, we need to focus on the true patent trolls. Apple is not a patent troll and arguing against this will push many people to the other side of patent reform debate.
Apple is not a patent troll, but patent trolling is merely one facet of patent abuse.
We need to focus on patent abuse, and Apple most certainly is abusing the recent flaws in the patent system, by patenting things which do not deserve patent protection (because patent protection for these things does not benefit society at large, discourages innovation, and is contra to the original intent of the patent system). The problem, fundamentally, is the system, not Apple, but because they are benefiting from its flaws, it's very likely they will defend them.
Unfortunately this will be quite hard, because Apple (along with other abusers) is also extremely, extremely, rich, and the rich tend to get their way...
I'm all in for revolutionary changes. Unfortunately, that's not what Apple did in this case.
The iPhone is outstanding design. And that is the extent of their work: with enough computing power, they made the first smartphone that didn't suck. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen.
If we want to argue for patent reform, we need to focus on the true patent trolls. Apple is not a patent troll and arguing against this will push many people to the other side of patent reform debate.