Bilski, and why any contemporary software patent is likely a crap patent

This is just a stub for now; I wanted to get this down as a placeholder and expound on this later.

Most of the software patents I've analyzed, and this is more than a few, make their central claims about solutions to engineering challenges. If I had asked one of the hundreds of software developers I've worked with over the last decade to come up with several potential options to any of these challenges, I'm certain they would have identified the models and mechanisms these patents claim as 'innovative'. I'm even more certain that these professional software developers would have faced no serious, insurmountable obstacles to implementing their proposed solutions in code.

This is the heart of my objection to the current state of software patents in the US - most companies try, and succeed, in obtaining patent protection for useful but not innovative, solutions to contemporary challenges. If an average software developer identifies and implements a solution to a challenge during the normal course of a product development cycle, this solution should not, by definition, be patentable - and the incentives for firms to seek protection for these products of the typical development process should be eliminated immediately.