At worst, the established interests will refuse to license to you, because they don't want a competitor. Hence patent pools, in which participants who are ofte

At worst, the established interests will refuse to license to you, because they don't want a competitor. 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.