That sounds ridiculous to me... By the same logic, I could patent a car that is charged by USB (not very efficient, but eh, it's new !) and then nobody could build a car charged via USB ?
If you paid the filing dues (a significant sum), and nobody has patented that before, then yes.
> nobody could build a car charged via USB?
Anybody could build a car powered by USB, and you could then sue them for the infringement of your patent. It could then go in many directions, from you becoming very rich, to your patent being invalidated and you found responsible for court fees.
It's so not ridiculous that Amazon was able to prevent the entire ecommerce industry from implementing anything even close to a "one click purchase" flow because of a patent. Not because you couldn't see Amazon's source code for the feature, or couldn't come up with your own completely different implementation of the idea, but because as long as you can convince a completely unsophisticated and inexpert jury members that a paragraph of extremely vague text can be read in any way to apply to anyone else's system, you are violating their patent.
Imagine being able to patent addition, or the very concept of a cake, such that nobody could make a product that was bready and/or sweet without paying you a protection fee.
Remember that the US patent office had to expressly ban any patent for "perpetual motion machine", not because it is literally impossible by physical reality, but because they kept granting patents for physically impossible perpetual motion machines
Many patents are granted by the patent office then revoked by judges.