> 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.

Can you elaborate on this? Do you mean that patents benefit the technical community because they grant legal monopolies and allow companies sell licensing?

Do you really think that selling licensing is the only financial benefit to a legal monopoly?

I'm sure they are rare among startup founders, but not rare in the wider realm. But it is not the fault of the patent system that people don't read them.

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.

Would you say that you suspect Google/Samsung employees read Apple patents to figure out what Apple is planning on doing, or if they read Apple patents to figure out how Apple has done things?

I am an engineer at Google. No, we don't read through patents to figure out how to do something. We are not idiots. If I wanted to implement a pinch/zoom system, I would just do it. It's not rocket science. In fact, I believe I did do it, before I worked at Google. I was writing code for an iPhone app on a version of IOS that did not have the gesture recognizers available in the public API. It's not that hard to recognize two points moving away from each other.