AFAIK this is what patents were supposed to do, instead of people locking away their inventions they would give incentives for people to share their knowledge so everyone would get the results but the owner would be able to benefit from publishing. Now it's "property", and people start talking mortality and trying to take moral high ground, starving artists and equating it with stealing, or some perverse economics rationalization focusing on profit as objective. Frankly I don't think I ever heard anyone saying that he read a patent to understand/learn something - although some papers were probably published after they got patents, I know two of those, but I would argue that those patents were blatantly obvious anyway, since I started working on the same problem and arrived at the same solution independently - found those papers after solving the problem/colleague pointed me to them - without even being an expert in the field - they did develop their ideas fully but I'm sure if I kept working on it, or someone else did, they would solve it, and both of those have immediate applications/have been developed for a product so the R&D would have to be done for product development, having it patented provided was not required for the investment.

True, but the compensation for sharing their knowledge is an absolute, legally enforceable lockdown for so many years. Everyone benefits only when the patent expires. In the meantime the patent holder controls the market and reaps the benefits, hence it becomes a legal, time-limited monopoly. The only possible countermeasure is to have critical patents yourself and play a game of dissuasion, or throw yourself into Mutually Assured Litigation.

Indeed in that case the only solution would have been to patent the 'guess which of the 2-10 multi-touch taps is intentional' technique in hopes that you could countersue or trade it, hence locking down the area further and preventing progress even more. And that's not even taking moral issues into account.

No, everyone benefits when the patent is published, because you can start studying how the invention worked. Of course this doesn't really apply to method patents that describe abstract solutions, which is why they are so terrible.

> The only possible countermeasure is to have critical patents yourself and play a game of dissuasion, or throw yourself into Mutually Assured Litigation.

The spirit of the patent system is not that you can/must form patent pools, but that you are forced to invent a different, and hopefully better, product. If nobody can come up with an improvement within a limited period of time, then this could be taken as proof that your solution is the best one, and thus everyone should have access to it. The reward to the inventor is simply part of the mechanism that causes things to be improved, it is not the entirety of it.

Fair point.

> The spirit of the patent system is not that you can/must form patent pools, but that you are forced to invent a different, and hopefully better, product. If nobody can come up with an improvement within a limited period of time, then this could be taken as proof that your solution is the best one

This is the theory, but practice differs wildly. More often than not you're not coming up with another, unrelated and possibly marginally better solution, but progressing by varying increments (standing on the solders of giants). Part of your improved solution could very well be found to be subject to the initial patent, either upfront when application is rejected, or later on when legally challenged. So a very real scenario is that you are simply forced to reinvent a wheel as being square when you should be focusing on improving a round one. As such maybe nobody could come up with an improvement precisely because nobody researched such a solution in the first place in fear of outrageous patent licensing costs on the parent method, or fear of litigation afterwards, both of which would simply make your research investment void.

I think the best way to deal with patents is to make a 4 year patent free period, in which you can file for new patents, but you can't sue anyone for infringement, and any work within those 4 years can't be affected by existing patents after the period expires. AFAIK this was already done by the US government in the aviation because they didn't want to pay Wright brothers, and the aviation industry grew, but I read this a long time I don't remember the details. But essentially you can measure the R&D investments in the industry and provide a empirical argument on how much R&D investment was lost (if any, I think the effect would be opposite, but it's a speculation) and compare with how much the industry has grown, then if you come to conclusion that patents are necessary measure the average R&D investment cost, profit, return periods, and compile that data in to a optimal time period which would allow the average successful/profitable patent to recoup the investment and earn a premium on standard rate of return.

I tried loading the live demo on a desktop browser and got many alerts about missing Cordova APIs. Perhaps you should put your PhoneGap/Cordova calls behind checks, so that the app works as a regular website as well (for the demo, I mean)?

That's good - parents only last 20 years, so that means the parent is almost expired.