Nick Bilton/The New York Times

At first glance, it looks as if we’re in the middle of a patent lawsuit Super Bowl party. Nearly every large mobile phone player — with the exception of Microsoft, Palm and, so far, Google — has recently been involved in some sort of patent litigation regarding mobile technologies.

The graphic above, showing a sampling of these lawsuits, can be almost dizzying to look at and decipher. Within the last year, for example, Apple was sued by the Taiwanese company Elan Microelectronics over alleged infringement of touch-screen patents. Kodak sued several companies over patents related to its digital-imaging technology. And on Wednesday, Apple sued HTC, the Taiwanese handset maker.

Although patent litigation is not new in the technology world, these suits, specifically around mobile, point to the drastically changing mobile landscape. Lawyers I spoke with explained that mobile technology was still in its infancy and these large computing companies were trying to stake their claim to the future of computing.

On Tuesday when I spoke with Eric Von Hippel, a professor of technological innovation at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management. He pointed out that patent lawsuits had turned particularly unpleasant lately as a result of companies that only buy and sell patents.

In the past, Mr. Von Hippel said, if companies entered a litigious dispute “they would usually come to an agreement to simply share each other’s patents.” But he said a new genre of patent lawsuits, brought on by what he calls “patent trolls,” had changed the nature of the disputes. These companies have no interest in using the patents, Mr. Von Hippel said, but instead hope to reap large sums of money from the lawsuits themselves.