I read the article you linked. It gave a different flavor than I thought. It seems there are a couple issues mixed together here.
The obviousness of a solution is hard to judge, especially since the answer is obvious once you see the answer. So it's hard to say whether anyone else would have done it.
My OP was more to point out the lack of obviousness for something like that than one might think on first blush. The wireless music box is obvious to us in hindsight. But in context of wireless radio at the time, most people used it to send messages. As a potential investor in the wireless music box retorted at the time, "Why would you send messages to nobody in particular?" Contextually, multicasting just wasn't in people's minds.
That said, patent system is broken in the way that Amazon and others use it. I can see why Bezos did it, but that can be a slippery slope to stifling innovation, as much as you try to protect against it.
And the lack of a good metric to tell how obvious something is, especially when seeing the answer makes it seem obvious might point to the idea of patents as being hard to enforce well, however good the merits having a patent system might be.
The obviousness of a solution is hard to judge, especially since the answer is obvious once you see the answer. So it's hard to say whether anyone else would have done it.
My OP was more to point out the lack of obviousness for something like that than one might think on first blush. The wireless music box is obvious to us in hindsight. But in context of wireless radio at the time, most people used it to send messages. As a potential investor in the wireless music box retorted at the time, "Why would you send messages to nobody in particular?" Contextually, multicasting just wasn't in people's minds.
That said, patent system is broken in the way that Amazon and others use it. I can see why Bezos did it, but that can be a slippery slope to stifling innovation, as much as you try to protect against it.
And the lack of a good metric to tell how obvious something is, especially when seeing the answer makes it seem obvious might point to the idea of patents as being hard to enforce well, however good the merits having a patent system might be.