Re: Fundamental Question
My objection based on the following argument:
The research that lead to the idea of software patterns showed that although the code might differ people presented with the same problem would come up with fundamentally similar solutions leading to the conclusion that most software solutions to problems are fairly obvious to people "skilled in the art". A novel piece of software might be no more than the result of a problem's first being posed to such a skilled person who does no more than what would be expected in solving it.
It follows from that that it should be a requirement to demonstrate that the proposed patent isn't obvious rather than assume that it isn't. The only such clearly non-obvious solutions, therefore, are those to problems which are well known in the literature but hitherto unsolved. Before a patent is granted the prospective patentors should be able to show the existence of such literature (and not straw-man articles of their own) well known in the field.
This makes the bar considerably higher even if it cuts the income of the US Patent Office. In fact the best example I can think of is HTTP/HTML in that Vannevar Bush & Ted Nelson's ideas had been floating about for years without any successful implementation. But what made them take off in the way they did wasn't being patented, just the reverse. It was their release with open source, unencumbered, working code; the very antithesis of patenting.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
