That may be. But my point is that the standard that is being applied here is exactly what has been applied in hardware for decades, and what has been held up before legislators as exemplars of what patents are supposed to be for.
Incidentally I think that there was some ingenuity there. When Jacob Rabinow created the pull-button, he had been asked to improve a push-button tuner. (A review of the source informs me that when you pulled it had the station, not the volume. My bad. I have not seen one of these radios in decades...) His reason for switching is that he knew the problems with existing push-button tuners, and could design a better pull-button tuner. The manufacturer he invented it for did not want to accept it because nobody else was building them.
Incidentally the inventor of that was Jacob Rabinow. Take a glance at http://museum.nist.gov/exhibits/rabinow/patents.html to see all of his patents. Given how many inventions he had, he clearly did not spend long on each. But his claim would e that without the patent system he would have had no incentive to invent them, and would have worked on other stuff.
I'm not defending this either way. Merely stating the official view of what the patent system is supposed to have been for. (And my personal feelings are the other way.)
The patent system is supposed to encourage the progress of science and useful arts, not to reward inventors. While that is a good thing, it's not something to sacrifice progress for.
We're heading towards a world where all the money is getting funneled towards patent lawsuits and away from building products. This is not a good thing.
That's well and good too--excepting the fact that the free market already does this, and at the rate the patent system/legal system move, the deck is utterly stacked against the pioneers unless they've got gigantic money behind them.
And since software has such low barriers to entry, this really does not help progress.
Incidentally I think that there was some ingenuity there. When Jacob Rabinow created the pull-button, he had been asked to improve a push-button tuner. (A review of the source informs me that when you pulled it had the station, not the volume. My bad. I have not seen one of these radios in decades...) His reason for switching is that he knew the problems with existing push-button tuners, and could design a better pull-button tuner. The manufacturer he invented it for did not want to accept it because nobody else was building them.
Incidentally the inventor of that was Jacob Rabinow. Take a glance at http://museum.nist.gov/exhibits/rabinow/patents.html to see all of his patents. Given how many inventions he had, he clearly did not spend long on each. But his claim would e that without the patent system he would have had no incentive to invent them, and would have worked on other stuff.
I'm not defending this either way. Merely stating the official view of what the patent system is supposed to have been for. (And my personal feelings are the other way.)