In general, the way patents are supposed to work is that you can't patent doing a thing, but you can patent the means by which something is done. So, for insta

In general, the way patents are supposed to work is that you can't patent doing a thing, but you can patent the means by which something is done. So, for instance you can patent a new kind of shovel, but you can't patent the act of digging a hole. That's kind of an important fine point that is usually glossed over by the technology press and in Internet discussions. That isn't to say that there aren't a lot of dumb patents granted (and I don't care to investigate the video emoji patent sufficiently to venture an opinion one way or the other), but I think the problem isn't quite as bad as it seems, since many patents are actually quite a bit narrower than they appear and that their owners would like everyone to believe.