For a couple of years, patents have hit the headlines with companies struggling to buy out portfolios of bankrupted competitors, with more and more ridiculous obvious patents granted by patent offices, or with “trials of the century” going on and on. This inflation of concerns around patents has culminated on August 24th, 2012, with Samsung being found liable for infringing some of Apple's mobile patents by a Californian jury. This over one billion dollars fine has given concrete expression to Steve Jobs' testimony, as laid down in his posthumous biography: “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product, I’m willing to go thermonuclear war on this.”
This article does not recount such events. Instead, its purpose is to show with a particular Apple's software patent, which was recently successfully enforced before a German court, how such a thermonuclear patent war is threaten to explode in Europe, would the current project about a unitary patent be adopted.