...but ffs! The reason is that Google is encouraging their employees to file patents, just as everybody else, since the patent system in regards to software pat

...but ffs! The reason is that Google is encouraging their employees to file patents, just as everybody else, since the patent system in regards to software patents is really just a pissing contest - they need patents to hit each other in the heads with, and it doesn't matter if it's obvious implementations of things that people with a common sense will figure out in 10 minutes. In this case it took a while to figure out the smart thing, and it took 10 minutes to find an application to patent. I worked for a company that probably infringed on an existing telecom patent that was more or less equivalent to looking in another sock drawer if you can't find a matching sock, but as it was related to "an apparatus or method" for "locating subscriber registry data" it was apparently novel enough to require a patent. It took me about 1 minute to come up with the solution as an obvious solution to a simple problem so it was clearly just rubbish. The patentee had about 2 million other patents, so if someone had actually cared we could potentially have infringed on several more patents and run out of money long before we could win.