Well, it's what patents are supposed to be. In reality, it all depends where you draw the line between "problem" and "solution", and IMO this is where a lot of

Well, it's what patents are supposed to be. In reality, it all depends where you draw the line between "problem" and "solution", and IMO this is where a lot of patents, especially software ones, go seriously wrong. If the problem is defined as "send images of checks instead of checks", then DataTreasury is trying to assert ownership over the entire problem rather than their particular solution - they're claiming that any solution that deals in images of checks instead of physical checks infringes, regardless of how it's implemented. If you define the problem as "don't send physical checks", then sure, the particular solution, "send images of checks instead" is what they're asserting ownership over. But in that case, the non-triviality of the solution is seriously questionable. There's no engineering insight at all required to come up with that, and it's one of the first things any group of people would think of when presented with the problem. The entire difficulty is all in how to actually implement such a system (and pre-1994, those implementation details made it unlikely that such a system would work). IMO, in a situation like this, what the patent should cover is the new stuff that DataTreasury actually invented (and I agree that there is some non-trivial content there), not the entire high level problem that their invention allowed them to solve.