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I think the question of obviousness is the most important question in the patent debates and the hardest to answer. By asking the question, as you've proposed,

I think the question of obviousness is the most important question in the patent debates and the hardest to answer. By asking the question, as you've proposed, you are necessarily giving information about the solution. Knowing which questions to ask is critical to inventing. Swype figured out the right question. It wouldn't be fair to prime the pump by asking it to others. This is not to say there aren't problems with software patents. There are vanishingly few patents that really tell you how to implement the "invention" and most of them don't actually do anything useful.

magicalist 14y ago
Isn't that exactly reader5000's point though? Swype might have answered the right question, but so many patents were filed at the same time, someone was bound to. It might have been a novel idea at that moment, but how much reward does the government need to bestow on something that you could essentially come up with in an afternoon? If everyone had copied the interface immediately, I would have felt for them making no money on "their" invention, but what progress in the arts and sciences is the patent really protecting? Imagine a world where for 1984-2004 Apple had patented everything down to the "OK" button in a system message. Should someone have a right to retard progress like that? Should someone have to reinvent something slightly different every time they want to enter the market?