Patents are totally beyond me.

Supposedly there's a concept of "non-obviousness" but every patent that is disputed is strikingly obvious to a "person of ordinary skill in the art."

On a panel of 5 competent engineers, asked "How might we go about identifying potential credit card fraud on the Internet?" I suspect all 5 would independently bring up the idea of storing customer IPs and comparing that to IPs that have used that credit card in the past.

I can't help but feel like patent law is just a way for lawyers to extract money from people actually trying to make things.