&gt;&gt; in order to acquire a patent you have to give details of how to perform it<p>Software patents don&#x27;t have to include code, and generally are not useful to a skilled practitioner in actually creating software. The are written in legalese by persons incentivized to seek as boad a claim as possible, while revealing as little usefully information as possible.<p>&gt;&gt; if it was so obvious then it would have been done<p>By this reasoning every new product should be protected by a monopoly. Sometimes how to do something is obvious, but no one wanted to do it before.<p>The question should be whether treating every new situation as an oportunity for government sponsored property grab is good for society, or just the first guy to file.<p>A huge number software developers get sued because they wrote software that violated a patent they had never heard of for a &quot;business method&quot; type of task, but &quot;with a computer&quot;. There are hundreds of thousands of software patents, so it&#x27;s not possible to read them all before selling software to make sure one hasn&#x27;t infringed, assuming one could actually be sure without simply defending a trial. The reason there are so many lawsuites is because it WAS obvious, and lots of people did the same thing without ever hearing of the patent untill they got sued.<p>I&#x27;m guessing that your not a programmer who&#x27;s read any software patents. I have never met one who has that did not agree that the contents of software patents were obfuscated and worthless for creating a storehouse of usefull knowlegde that benefits society, what is the constituionally mandated purpose of patents in the first place.