You don't have to contest the patent for it to be suppressing others' design. I once worked for a company that made a humidifying air pump. We had to have the water tank held in with a removable flap rather than a door because our main competitor had patented 'holding the tank in with a hinged flap/door'. Sure, you could fight it in court, down the track, after hardware design (which is much more expensive than people realise). Or you could move onto the next problem and have a slightly inferior product. Patents on trivial things stifle innovation.

The points I was trying to make (and clearly failed) is that Apple does not have a patent on pinch to zoom, so they couldn't contest the patent on it, because it doesn't belong to them.

Something funny is going on - I don't recall doing my reply against this particular comment, I think it was meant to be against a different comment about patents being trivial to work around or somesuch. Probably human error on my part, my apologies.

Thank you for linking those articles, that was very helpful.

That said, Google was lucky that there was a loophole in the patent definition. Imagine a world where Apple had actually obtained an airtight patent on a system that listens for single- or multi-touch gestures and switches between scrolling and pinch-to-zoom appropriately (which is essentially what the patent in question does). So, you'd be free to implement pinch-to-zoom as long as it doesn't infringe on that. Good luck.

(the point here being that, de facto, Apple would essentially have a patent on pinch-to-scroll. In real life [not in the proposed alternate universe] this is almost true -- there are loopholes, but you have to hire a patent lawyer to find and/or confirm them).

Imagine something completely different happened, based on that, something bad could then have come out of it?

I'd rather not, lets just stick to the facts and not build strawmen. It's bad enough to even discuss pinch-to-zoom or rounded rectangles when that's not what the trial was even about.

If we're discussing the Apple trial, lets figure out what really happened, not just repeat what we read from the press.

Apple's original claim didn't have that "loophole", but added it after the patent office rejected the original version as being anticipated by prior art (specifically, a patent [1] and a patent application [2]).

[1] http://www.google.com/patents/US7576732

[2] http://www.google.com/patents?id=gKyRAAAAEBAJ

And even then sometimes you have to hire a team of lawyers to defend your loopholes in a trial.