Complying with relevant standards is a completely orthogonal issue to that of novelty and patentability. The question at hand is whether patents should protect

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'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.