Complying with relevant standards is a completely orthogonal issue to that of novelty and patentability. The question at hand is whether patents should protect products that are insufficiently novel to prevent it being cloned by a competitor. In my opinion, if a person technically competent in the appropriate fields could produce an equivalent design by having the product&#x27;s functionality described to them then it should not be patentable. This also takes care of such idiocy as the Amazon one-click-buy patent, which is a simple matter to implement once given a description of its functionality.