Patents can protect an invention, but they rarely protect a category once it proves valuable. When Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007, he made a point of saying they had “patented the heck out of it.” They had. Multi-touch gestures, interface behaviors, hardware details, all heavily protected by Apple. Over 200 patents filed on that original model alone. Within a few years, the market filled with devices that looked and behaved in strikingly similar ways. Jobs later described it as...