Comment The wrong criteria (Score 1) 731
If this is accurate, it's an even worse situation than right now.
The fact that the patent office is granting obvious patents, or patents "it's a good idea to do this" rather than "this is a good way to do something" is the problem.
The patent system is designed to promote innovation. It does so by allowing people to exploit an invention without the overhead of trying to keep it secret. If this becomes the policy, then if you come up with innovation, you need to keep it secret, because it is only protected by trade secret.
There's a large (and to me, obvious) difference between something like the one click patent ("if we let people order with only one click, we can make lots of money") and RSA (a specific method of doing public key cryptography). The criteria should be that a patent must clearly specify a *method* of doing something, which would be non-obvious to someone skilled in the art who was confronted by the problem of "how should I do this".