Apple tried to ban other companies from using GUI, claiming ownership of the concept. Of course, they themselves got the idea from Xerox, which got the idea from SRI/Englebart, which got the idea from Sketchpad (Ian Sutherland), which got the idea from Memex/Vannevar Bush all the way back from 1945. There's a continuous lineage of which Apple was a part of and clearly pushed the field further from military and corporate R&D to consumer, but did they deserve to own a monopoly on it?
Which is generally a response to itself being sued constantly over the iPod.