But if that were the case, the patent would almost certainly be invalid; the claimed invention must be inventive, i.e. having come up with something that is not

But if that were the case, the patent would almost certainly be invalid; the claimed invention must be inventive, i.e. having come up with something that is not obvious. What is described is coming up with the obvious solution to a problem, not coming up with an inventive solution to the problem. It's also annoying when people use soundbites from famous people as proof; they sound good and make sense on the surface but usually don't hold up to scrutiny (and I say this as someone who has a lot of time for John Carmack's advice and insights). An example might be the invention of bloom filters[1]. I would argue that if you were looking for a way to check for membership in a set in the time before the bloom filter's invention, it would not have been obvious to devise a structure which can give false positives but no false negatives through the use of multiple hashing functions and a bit array. It is of course obvious to us now, knowing the answer, but at the time it would not have been. this is what the patent system is about; encouraging people to invest time, effort and money into inventive solutions to problems by giving them a way to protect their investment for a limited period of time. Somehow this all becomes evil when a large company is doing it, but you'll all be outraged when a startup comes up with something inventive and have their ideas "stolen" by big companies when they didn't seek to protect themselves. [1] I'm not saying this is a shining example of a patented technology; I have no idea whether it has ever been patented or not. However it is a good example of an inventive solution and one which most people would not regard as obvious and be able to come up with through routine trial and error.