Patents, schmatents

I just read about a photographer who made a circuit to remotely trigger his camera using standard family walkie-talkies:

http://www.robertbenson.com/blog/archives/860

While this is neat and it looks like he did a good job implementing it, I was surprised and disappointed to see he decided to persue a patent for it.  Not only is this a fairly obvious idea, it's not even unique... it's even been a project in Make magazine (http://www.make-digital.com/make/vol15/?pg=153).  Rather than trying to create a false monopoly for himself, it would have been nice if he'd followed the lead of Mitch Altman and others in the open-source hardware movement: http://blog.makezine.com/archive/2008/11/patentbgone_inventor_mitc.html . He could still make some money off of producing this for people, but he could also benefit from the free ideas for improvements from other gearheads.