You're kidding right? Sure, I'll dig through the patent lists for a few hours digging up the hundreds of examples of patents that were creative new ideas for th

You're kidding right? Sure, I'll dig through the patent lists for a few hours digging up the hundreds of examples of patents that were creative new ideas for their time. Very little of them will be software patents. But this isn't a discussion about patents like that. This is a discussion about patents being granted for ideas that are simply innovations and/or copies of pre-existing ideas. That's completely different. Not every patent is of equal creativity, importance, and value.