DEPENDING ON where one sets the threshold, everything can be considered an 'invention' -- virtually any idea one comes up with any time of the day. Typically the large corporations use their financial power to amass many such "ideas" and turn these into patent monopolies. It's not like the EPO or the USPTO (under Campinos, Battistelli and Iancu) like to say "no" to applicants. EPC and 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101? Be damned! Anything with "technical effect" or "HEY HI" (AI) can now be turned into a European software patent.

"...when patent offices are themselves disregarding the law, where can they derive the moral authority by which to assert they exist to uphold or to facilitate the law?"This is of course a violation in spirit and in practice of what the patent system was originally made for. The violators aren't patent infringers but those who infringe patent law by granting invalid patents. Put another way, when patent offices are themselves disregarding the law, where can they derive the moral authority by which to assert they exist to uphold or to facilitate the law? ⬆