No, they're not. You may like to believe this, but it's not a fact. Many inventions are quite mundane, but doesn't mean they weren't inventive (ie, non-obvious) at the time. And the other thing that most people seem to forget is that examiners must be able to show that the invention is obvious to be able to object to it, there must be proof that a person skilled in the art _world_ do X. you might counter that by saying the applicant must say why it is inventive, but that's something that is impossible to do (except in circumstances where the common general knowledge in the art has been that X is impossible, and then you show that you have done X).

Simple things should not be ineligble for patents, and what you are proposing is excluding from patent protection anything that is simple. Also if you're looking at a patent that is in a field that you're skilled in and you can't understand it "ok, it's right in front of my eyes, but what is this magic?" then the patent hasn't fully disclosed the invention and it shouldn't have been granted (or you're just not skilled enough, many patents require vast amounts of knowledge to be able to understand and the "person skilled in the art" may be a team of people).

I think the last paragraph there is self-contradictory. Simple things shouldn't be patentable, precisely because the invention doesn't need to be fully disclosed.

To take a silly example, let's say I propose a patent on the process of painting a house green. That's the entire text of the patent. Should it be granted? No. In part because I haven't fully disclosed the invention. But what could I possibly add? "Step 1. Cover house with green paint."

A government granted monopoly is a big gun. Far too big if the goal is just to provide you with revenue. Government works for the people, not one company, and if we're going to give you the right to exclusively profit from something, we demand to get something in return. The thing we demand is knowledge. We want to know how you did it so that after your monopoly expires, everyone can benefit from the increase in knowledge. If your "invention" is so simple that we all already know how to do it, then we don't need the "full disclosure" of a patent, and we don't need to buy your description of painting the house green for the enormous cost of having to pay you exhorbitant fees for every green house for the next two decades.

Firstly, your example is so ridiculous I can't see how it adds anything to the discussion. No, it would never be granted a patent, so what exactly is your point?

Secondly, you have accurately described the patent system;

> if we're going to give you the right to exclusively profit from something, we demand to get something in return. The thing we demand is knowledge. We want to know how you did it so that after your monopoly expires, everyone can benefit from the increase in knowledge.

But you go off the rails when you confuse simple and known. The point of a patent is to disclose the invention in a clear enough way for someone else to be ablwe to perform it. Once you know the answer, it probably will seem simple. But that does not mean it's not inventive (ie, no one else has done it before, and you qwere the first to have made that knowledge available to the public).

I'm not confusing simple and known; I'm just including both in the decision as to whether something is eligible for patent protection. As the patent office is required to do (the term used in patent law is "non-obvious" rather than simple, but it's the same concept).

You aren't eligible for a patent just because you did something first.

Simple is not the same as non-obvious, so no, it's not the term used in patent law. Something is obvious if a non-inventive person skilled in the art _would_ have performed it through routine steps (at least here, some of the mosaics I see coming from the US are batshit insane and no sane person would have used them to come to same result the examiners is claiming - that said, this is a practice that is in favour of the public, it requires the applicant to reduce the scope of the claims further which leads to smaller monopolies).

> The point of patents is not to protect things that are obvious in hindsight.

You might like that to be the case but most of the canonical examples of things that should be patented are just that sort of thing. For example various patents have been granted for paper clips[0]. If it still isn't obvious how it is done after people see it you could argue that the patent isn't necessary - trade secret would do.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_clip