Putting aside UI patents, if a patent is "non-obvious" is should not be the case that people routinely run afoul of the patent without the details of it being d

Putting aside UI patents, if a patent is "non-obvious" is should not be the case that people routinely run afoul of the patent without the details of it being disclosed. However, this is precisely what is happening in the software industry. In fact, typical legal advice for engineers is to not read patents at all. And still, it is impossible to write any sort of complicated program without running a foul of numerous software patents. A truly innovative patent would be one which would be fairly unlikely to be rediscovered independently. How likely is it that a typical person skilled in the art would have come up with PageRank if the algorithm was not published? Another academic might have, but it would not be likely that an average programmer would. On the other hand, that linked list patent? That is not innovation. The idea of searching multiple databases from a single search box? Not innovative. Searching for and identifying entities like phone numbers in text? Not innovative.