Let's be honest now: how often do you see a patent and think to yourself, "Gosh, this patent is really complicated and the text is just not explanatory enough, I really wish I had some code or flowcharts to make it clearer!"
Most patents (software or otherwise) are of a complexity where a person of ordinary skill in the art can re-implement it from scratch with a fair level of fidelity by reading just the abstract. Triviality of implementation is not the same as obviousness. And just because software makes it very easy to go from idea to implementation does not mean it's not an invention.
how often do you see a patent and think to yourself, "Gosh, this patent is really complicated
Never. Software patents are almost always intended to monopolize some trivial and obvious function in such a way as to make the established users of that function pay a grifter who juked the Patent Office. There's no reason to patent anything complicated in software because you could just work around it.
Triviality of implementation is not the same as obviousness.
No, triviality of implementation is a superset of obviousness. There are obvious things that are nontrivial to implement, but there are no non-obvious things that are trivial to implement.
Comments
Let's be honest now: how often do you see a patent and think to yourself, "Gosh, this patent is really complicated and the text is just not explanatory enough, I really wish I had some code or flowcharts to make it clearer!"
Most patents (software or otherwise) are of a complexity where a person of ordinary skill in the art can re-implement it from scratch with a fair level of fidelity by reading just the abstract. Triviality of implementation is not the same as obviousness. And just because software makes it very easy to go from idea to implementation does not mean it's not an invention.
how often do you see a patent and think to yourself, "Gosh, this patent is really complicated
Never. Software patents are almost always intended to monopolize some trivial and obvious function in such a way as to make the established users of that function pay a grifter who juked the Patent Office. There's no reason to patent anything complicated in software because you could just work around it.
Triviality of implementation is not the same as obviousness.
No, triviality of implementation is a superset of obviousness. There are obvious things that are nontrivial to implement, but there are no non-obvious things that are trivial to implement.
>There are obvious things that are nontrivial to implement, but there are no non-obvious things that are trivial to implement
Diffie Hellman key exchange
RSA
They both have 1 or 2 liners in various languages, google them.