[hughesdan]

Good point. The whole reason we have patent law in the first place is to promote the progress of science. Patents still have a role in some industries where inventing is expensive and cloning is cheap (e.g. pharmaceuticals). But on the web we don't need them. They do more harm than good. I've thought for a while that patent examiners should take into account the investment made by the inventor, giving greater weight to inventions that take a lot of time & money and less weight to inventions that were trivially easy to hack together.