Microsoft Served with Lawsuit Over Live Tiles

But the fact that they are not sold for money is not the reason why they can't be patented....the reason they can't be patented is because they are clear and accessible to anyone with the sufficient background. If I give you a class in Differential Geometry and ask you to prove the Gauss Bonnet theorem, whatever you come up with will be pretty much identical, with minor personal idiosyncrasies, to what I would come up with and what Gauss and Bonnet came up with more than a century ago. And it wouldn't be the same because you copied what anybody else did, it would be the same because there is really only one way to do it, or at least there is only one really intuitive and obvious way, any alternative proof is going to be less obvious and intuitive, or it would rely on knowledge that you don't obtain in standard course.

You can't patent something which literally ANYBODY with sufficient background knowledge could do.