Patents aren't about doing something new. They are non obvious ideas - read the definition please. Amazon 1 click patent was an example of idiodicy of "something new". This blasé attitude to patents is extremely dangerous. It stifles innovation and hurts society - the exact opposite of why patents were created. Imagine if i patented RGB 128, 179, 253 because I couldn't find that value hadn't been used before. Should this be patentable? What about patenting a piece of timber 3.914 ft x 1.234 ft? This is where Apple deserve a really hard kick in the balls. They patented something so generic and obvious that it is almost impossible not to breach it. You've heard the saying "standing on the shoulders of giants" - what it means is that technology has enabled a bunch of potential inventions. Patterns of these combinations emerge naturally - sine pick up on it quicker than others... But such incremental steps should not be patentable because someone else would have easily come up with the same thing. Now if you tell me that someone invented a new DSP, or a new compression algorithm that was genuinely different, then that is a good example. Ask the question: would someone have easily come up with it, roughly at the same time ... And... Does it help of harm society to grant this patent... Then and only then should a patent bd granted. - posted from my iPhone

Actually, part of the criteria for getting a patent (at least in the states) is that the invention is non-obvious to those in the trade. So patents kind of are about doing things that are hard.

And you could argue that zooming in on an HTML bounding box would be obvious to an engineer developing web browsers.

In theory, you're wrong (and you certainly should be).

In practice, I'd take it a step further: Patents aren't about doing things that are hard. They're about doing things that are new... to the patent office.

Not that I was making any comment on patentability.

But if the process isn't difficult, and we can assume that people individually have used zoom to zoom in on text, then the extent of the innovation is having it as a preset.