Many patents are "obvious" before the fact, thus prior art.

Show us a patent that is not obvious.

You're kidding right? Sure, I'll dig through the patent lists for a few hours digging up the hundreds of examples of patents that were creative new ideas for their time. Very little of them will be software patents.

But this isn't a discussion about patents like that. This is a discussion about patents being granted for ideas that are simply innovations and/or copies of pre-existing ideas. That's completely different.

Not every patent is of equal creativity, importance, and value.

Being obvious doesn't make it prior art alone. If that were the case, Shazam would owe me millions.

I'm saying the patent was obvious before the fact because of prior art. Just because someone was the first to patent something doesn't mean that they can claim it was not obvious before their patent was issued.

If you had prior art that invalidates a patent it doesn't necessarily mean the owner of the patent owes you money.