I think you're arguing against a straw man. The idea of pinch to zoom isn't patented, it's specific tricks to the implementation, which the patent explains, that are patented.
Re:Apple Never Invented Anything
by surrealize on Sunday September 02, 2012 @10:38PM
(#4468923)
The world that you were describing, without patent protection, would be perfectly fine for software.
Do you think samsung needed to refer to apple's patent to figure out those tricks? Or that those tricks needed significant R&D to come up with, which requires patent protection? I do not.
I'm a computer graphics student with a little linear algebra background.
How you would implement pinch to zoom was immediately obvious to me after seeing it.
Funny then that rival implementations turn out to miss nuances Apple dealt with in its 1.0 implementation.
http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/30/3279628/apple-pinch-to-zoo...
I've implemented pinch-to-zoom in a bunch of different contexts, and I agree that it's easy to do a half-assed version. AFAIK that's not what Apple patented, and you're free to implement half-assed pinch-to-zoom to your heart's content (although you may be infringing an earlier patent).
So, without patent protection, pinch-to-zoom would have been a secret and the rest of us would never have been able to figure it out? Or, without patent protection, no one would have put in the R&D effort to come up with pinch-to-zoom?
Obviously not.
The benefits that patents are supposed to provide to society just aren't benefits at all in this case. So, as a society, we ought to figure out a way to change the law so that it provides benefits where needed without doing more harm than good. It's clearly doing more harm than good in software right now.