[starfox]

Exactly his point here. my.yahoo.com was innovative for its time, and patents are supposed to last 20 years, right? So according to the legal system in place, the public should use my.yahoo.com till around 2020.

I agree, what could really be any other purpose for patents? Is a judge going to say, 10 years into a patent, "well, our process thought this was novel 10 years ago, but it doesn't seem so novel to me now"?

The problem is that this 20-year term makes no sense in software, if the public wants to use the latest and greatest thing.

[ahlatimer]

No, because non-obviousness is judged according to the time in which the thing was invented. Was it non-obvious in 2000? If it was, its patent remains intact, even if it seem obvious now.

And I'll point out that novelty and non-obviousness are two different things in the context of patents. The majority of software patents seem to fail the latter the majority of the time. Novelty is more of a wash.