[gizmodo59]

Not to sound condescending but the following phrase

"years of research and brilliant ideas should be protected"

can never adequately define what must be patented and what must not be. An brilliant idea need not take years of research. Even the interpretation of the word brilliant is debatable.

PS: I'm not taking any stance with respect to patents. Just saying that it's not black and white.

[BatFastard]

Agreed, no issue I know of is black and white. I think the grammar is correct though, or should I have said "years of research OR brilliant ideas"? Would you have preferred "insightful ideas"

[svachalek]

Patents are required to be both "novel" (no one has done it before) and "non-obvious" (a typical software engineer wouldn't have thought of it). These seem to cover it pretty well to me, except that novelty is trivial to find in the software world and the bar for obviousness seems to be completely ignored; I've never heard of a software patent so obvious it was rejected.

[icelancer]

Agreed. Many things sound obvious in plain English but when you ask someone to write an actual law that everyone will abide by (and will survive committees and constitutionality challenges), it becomes quite a bit more difficult.