Patent Trolls Are Now Crushing Parts Of The Developer Economy

News that Boston University is suing Apple AAPL -0.59% over parts for the iPhone and iPad (the component in question is called “highly insulating monocrystalline gallium nitride thin films”), is one more dull thud of the patent lawyers’ dossier on the smartphone scene. The University already took action against Samsung back in March. But the bigger picture is that companies like Apple and Samsung are encouraging troll-like behavior. It is reverberating seriously on start-ups in the developer economy.

That’s the message from Jon Potter, who runs the Application Developers Alliance, an organization that provides support and advocacy for around 25,000 app developers, many of them independent companies building apps in the Google and Apple ecosystems.