Perhaps it's because they never learned from their biggest mistake, and appear doomed to continue repeating it?

1. Create market leading products (Apple computer)
2. Make large profits from customers
3. Keep everything to themselves in a tightly closed environment
4. Get steamrolled by more open competition (IBM et al / Microsoft)
5. Start downward spiral towards bankruptcy

So what do they do this time around:

1. Create market leading products (iPhone/iPad)
2. Make large profits from customers
3. Keep everything to themselves in a tightly closed environment
4. Get steamrolled by more open competition (Samsung et al / Google)
5. ???

Perhaps if they went easier on 2 and skipped 3 they wouldn't hit 4 and 5?

Have you ever considered taking a leaf out of Ghandi's book when fighting software patents, and organise something disruptive to the US Patent Office or courts? An Anti-Software-Patent day for example, where software developers send large numbers of humorous software patent applications to overload the Patent office staff for the day?

Are you trying to tell me that a patent titled "Determining and/or using location information in an ad system" is unrelated to it's title? No wonder software patents have a bad name...

Geolocation price information appears to be only a small component of the claims, and is IMO an obvious extension on the idea of location based keyword advertising, particularly as price auctions were already used at the time for regular keyword ads.

So obvious, in fact that IIRC, it's in the source code of the advertising engine mentioned in the papers.

Here are papers published in 2001 and 2003 describing location advertising in the open source mobilemaps search engine:

http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=281
http://www.directionsmag.com/article.php?article_id=369

This still has a ghost site up on the net. One of the original authors is contactable at abrahaph at yahoo's .co.uk website.