The title of this says it all when it comes to most (maybe even all) of the software patents I've run across (caveat: I've never dealt with serious software pat

The title of this says it all when it comes to most (maybe even all) of the software patents I've run across (caveat: I've never dealt with serious software patents dealing with non-trivial algorithms like compression, encryption, etc.). So many software and business process patents would have been thought of by so many different people, it only faced with the situation. So in that sense I think, yes, many, many ideas are really commodities. Where ideas are not commodities are, for instance, breakthroughs in logic like Haskell Curry or Kurt Goedel made.