Hence patent pools, in which participants who are often direct competitors agree to license to each other and anybody else on the same terms.
Are you seriously suggesting that the creators of Android read Apple's patents, as a way of "catching up?"
I can't speak for him but I don't think that's what he's saying.
You're fixating on the common fallacy that the only things that can or should be patentable are things that cannot possibly be understood except by reading a thorough working description by the party that created it. This is wrong.
I have here on my keychain an instance of patent 4,864,898 "Combination pop-top can and bottle opener". It consists of a shaped piece of plastic with a little piece of metal, and it is completely obvious how it works just by using it. There is no hidden mechanism and nothing that needs explaining. And yet: this did not fall off a tree. This is not a product of nature but of human ingenuity lending greater value to this shape than the equivalent mass of plastic in a less intentional shape. It's that difference that a patent attempts to recognize as an independent thing that has economic value, not the textual description of the patent, which is an artifact of that recognition.
So, to bring that back around: the point is that without patents, any invention which is not either directly tied to the means of production or hidden in a black box loses the bulk of it's economic value and thus the bulk of it's reason for ever being created.
Patents were definitely part of the plan from the start or Jobs wouldn't have stood on stage in front of a giant 200+ slide at the 2007 keynote and said:
"We filed for over 200 patents for all the inventions in iPhone and we intend to protect them."*
With no patents they wouldn't have had any defense against the other mobile phone makers. That's the way it works. You say I infringe your patents, I say you infringe mine, we come to a cross-licencing agreement. Otherwise, I pay you money.
* Bottom of this page - http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/live-from-macworld-2007-s...
Patents & Intellectual property are an anathema to a free society. Though they do allow entrenched interests protect their market from upstarts.
When Apple released the iPhone, they were the upstart in the mobile phone segment. The patents are what allowed/allows Apple to protect themselves from the 'entrenched interests' of the market. That is what good the patents provide.
They have a vested interest in having their technologies (ones for which they have pools) win over other technologies, and they have a whole chest of patents (aka. legal weapons) with which to intimidate companies who won't come into the fold.
The whole problem of patents is that they give established interests total control over everyone else. At best, the established interests will be content to just take a cut. At worst, the established interests will refuse to license to you, because they don't want a competitor. And they can change their mind on this matter whenever they want.
> That VP8 infringes on patents is pretty much a sure thing-- unless I'm fundamentally misunderstanding how VP8 works
How do you know that h.264 doesn't infringe on Google patents?
> If you wish to go to a system whereby there is no patent system, then recognize that people wouldn't be revealing their inventions, and thus things like android couldn't exist, because they wouldn't have a source of technology to copy.
Are you seriously suggesting that the creators of Android read Apple's patents, as a way of "catching up?" Or that Apple wouldn't have released the iPhone, which is a cash cow for them, if they couldn't patent it?