Can you explain how patents don't grant a type of legal monopoly? This seems non-obvious to me, and poking around on Wikipedia has only served to reinforce my suspicion that they are.
If your objection is to there being a monopoly at all, I can understand that. But please then consider several things- for instance, if this system were abolished then companies like Apple would be obscuring their methods to prevent copying, and their platforms would be more locked down. I think if we lived in a world without patents, many of the anti-IP people would be advocating for a requirement that companies like Apple publish the nature of their inventions.
It need not be one or the other. In the specific patents under discussion, I hardly think competitors could not figure out how to implement multi-finger touching, or pinch-to-zoom. An idea that is easy to re-implement (or has a means of implementation obvious to industry workers) once made public simply shouldn't be protected by patent. By and large, companies can work around patented implementations, but not when they are so broad as to essentially encompass the whole idea (e.g. unified search, or multi-touch sensing). In the first place, patents are granted for specific implementations, not ideas.
It's clear to me that the standards and enforcement of the obviousness principle need to be raised.
To what extent do these patents actually benefit the technical community though? As you seem to know, a technically inclined person that actually reads other peoples patents seems to be a rare animal.
I like to get paid for my technical work. Patents have some effect in that area.
I already mentioned one benefit that doesn't require reading the patents, and that is there is less incentive to obfuscate designs or lock down products.
Secondly, for situations where there is a major break thru, patents give companies caught flat footed a chance to come up to speed by reading the details of the invention so that they can then extend it.
I don't, for a second, doubt that many engineers in Google and Samsung have read these Apple patents, for instance. Of course the official policy is that they don't, and they will never admit it in court (they'll never let the people who did read them testify) but the level of industrial espionage that these companies engage in is such that it seems exceedingly unlikely they wouldn't read freely available publications designed to reveal these inventions.
But that is also the purpose of the patent system.
Where things are broken here is that Google feels they can get away with infringing because in the past court cases have been long time coming and relatively weak in their impact. So, google made the calculated decisions to simply violate the patents.
Excuse me?
How could Apple possibly lock their platform down even more?