One of my friends is an IP attorney and I had a conversation with him about the ridiculousness of patent law and software and his response to me was, "I think one of the problems with software engineers and patents is their over-estimation of 'obviousness'."
What he meant was that we can look at something and quickly reverse engineer the logic to construct it, but coming up with the idea originally is often much more difficult than the simple patented solution would indicate. That's what we do right? We take difficult concepts and distill them into solutions.
Realize, this algorithm was developed in 1918. Try rewinding your mind to what the world knew back then and this algorithm may have been ground breaking!
A lot of us hackers think these problems are easy to solve when really, we never even realized before we saw the solution that it was a problem at all! Another issue is that we often, through modesty, humility, or a lack of self-awareness really under-appreciate how smart we really are -- relative to the population as a whole. We judge ourselves compared to other hackers and the other brilliant people we work with over the years. We isolate ourselves from the masses to a large degree and so we think we aren't as smart as we are or our ideas and solutions and our inventions really aren't as unique and innovative as they are. Most of the things we take for granted are really far beyond what the vast majority of the world even remotely considers or ever will consider for the entirety of their lives.
Is your friend of the belief that ideas should be patentable?
That I can use any idea I want to “build my product” is what has allowed our society to evolve to where we are. And when I grab a dozen ideas from the public ___domain I will refine these, maybe add a few of my own (original) ideas to the mix, and in turn inspire others.
I actually know of one original idea I had which has inspired the creation of other products, and I am honestly happy about that. This is how things should work! Also, this “original” idea of mine was really just taking an idea from another ___domain and use it in another context :)
The obviousness of solutions isn't overrated; rather, the obviousness of the problem ___domain is what's overrated. Great ideas solve problems people didn't even know existed. When people know about the problems, the solutions are much easier to find, and it's one of the sources of second-mover advantage: discovering a good problem doesn't necessarily mean one comes up with a good solution.
