At Ars Technica, James Grimmelmann has written an excellent guide to understanding the smartphone wars: it’s all about who will win control of the stacks:

A smartphone’s “smarts” require plenty of tech. Think about all the layers that come together so that you could play Angry Birds on your iPhone:
*The app itself: Rovio’s Angry Birds
*The operating system that supports downloadable apps: Apple’s iOS
*The device that runs the OS: the iPhone, also by Apple.
*The cellular network that the device connects to: AT&T or Verizon in the US
These different parts make up a stack: layers that fit together, each one on top of the next, to do cool things for users. Good combinations sell well, making money for the participants. Everyone wants to be part of a winning stack, but even better is to be the bottleneck in a winning stack so that everyone else can join in only on your terms—and at your price.

But how does one secure control of the most lucrative pieces of the stack? That’s where influencing the laws and regulations governing the stack comes in. Grimmelman describes the legal battles happening at every layer of the stack. Patent litigation is at the center of this epic battle:

Finally, we have the strategic assaults on the stack itself, with the goal either of shutting it down or extracting every last cent possible. There are now so many smartphone patent suits that just keeping track of them is a difficult exercise. Things have gotten so intense that individual lawsuits may be nothing more than skirmishes in larger back-and-forth wars, like the way that Samsung and Apple are each suing each other in a sprawling international dispute. Despite the drama, these brouhahas often end with cash payments and licensing deals, like the recent Nokia-Apple settlement.
Of course, patent litigation, patent licensing, and patent trolling are nothing new. Where things get truly interesting is when a patent covers something so central to a stack that it the patent owner can threaten to shut the whole thing down. The real trend-setter here was NTP’s lawsuit against RIM. NTP’s patents covered core aspects of BlackBerry’s push e-mail system, a feature RIM couldn’t have deactivated without turning BlackBerries into near-bricks. Once RIM’s challenge to the validity of NTP’s patents failed, RIM had almost no choice but to settle in 2006 on NTP’s terms, for a stunning $612.5 million. Tactically, NTP’s lawsuit was simple: RIM was the obvious target, since it had the deep pockets and more or less was the complete BlackBerry stack.
More recent patent campaigns, though, have shown that it’s possible to target other players as well. Lodsys, for example, which claims to have patents on in-app purchasing, has been strategically targeting iPhone andAndroid app developers. Lodsys isn’t the first patent owner to go after app developers, but it’s taken the shakedown strategy to a new level. Being smaller, app developers are more vulnerable than the big players; even Rovio pales in comparison with an Apple or a Motorola. Lodsys is hoping that the developers will just pay its .575 percent royalty rather than spend the immense sums required to litigate a patent lawsuit. [Emphasis added]

Grimmelmann, an associate professor at New York Law School, has done us a great service with this article, as have the good people at Ars Technica. As an aside, those of who follow and care about politics and policy need to have a better understanding of “where the rubber meets the road,” i.e., how well our chosen abstractions describe realities on the ground.

This, incidentally, is one reason I was so pleased to learn (via Tim Lee, naturally) that three leading libertarian think tanks have weighed in on what I believe to be the right side in the patent wars.