Should they own this idea for the next decade or so? Probably not, but how about the next 12-24 months? At least long enough so that they get a head start against competitors who didn't get there first.This is probably about as long as it would take for a competitor to write the necessary code and do the necessary testing anyway, so it seems that the reward of being first to market with good code is enough compensation for the risk involved.
If we really want to fight software patents of obvious ideas, or permutations of obvious ideas, perhaps somebody should write a tool that simply combine every obvious idea in software into some greater system, then documents it all thus creating prior art that stops all of these so called bad patents...and then patent the "prior art permuter". In other words, if the ideas are obvious, a piece of software that does this should be buildable. I call this the "obviousness of software patents theorem".
I was thinking about a similar system, wherein hardware and software components are treated like building blocks. You throw some (or all) known blocks into a bag, and randomly draw n blocks and come up with a way they can be used together. You then start applying random domains to the same building blocks (e.g. security, gaming, manufacturing, automobiles) to prove that moving an existing invention to a new domain should be obvious.