Current law, as upheld by juries lacking sufficient knowledge, disagrees with the intent of the law.
Patents don't cover ideas, they cover implementation. Literally if your way of implementing something is the non-obvious way to make something more efficient, you are granted the right to exclusive use of it.
Apple, by act of jury, now has a patent on the idea and not the implementation. The patent is on a capacitive touch screen, but is a jury going to uphold a patent if it is an optical touchscreen? What if I use pinch-zoom on my Kinect?
Patents don't cover ideas, they cover implementation. Literally if your way of implementing something is the non-obvious way to make something more efficient, you are granted the right to exclusive use of it.
Apple, by act of jury, now has a patent on the idea and not the implementation. The patent is on a capacitive touch screen, but is a jury going to uphold a patent if it is an optical touchscreen? What if I use pinch-zoom on my Kinect?