The patent system will not grant or uphold patents that are judged to be obvious. The standard of obviousness developed in other fields is inappropriate for software. Patent examiners and judges are accustomed to considering even small, incremental changes as deserving new patents. The court ruled that these differences were unobvious.
Computer scientists solve problems quickly because the medium of programming is tractable.
They are trained to generalize solution principles from one problem to another. One such generalization is that a procedure can be repeated or subdivided. Cases such as this cannot be considered errors.