Supreme Court loosens patent 'obviousness' test

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Obvious is not out! Its finally in.

The obvious standard in the past was completely misrepresented by past court definitions of the term. The defining standard of obvious in the past was well beyond what most human beings would consider as obvious "teaching, suggestion or motivation must exist to show..." Thats not just obvious, its at the very least, the very very least previously considered and written about or taught as such. Thats well beyond obvious. If that was an accurate standard that would imply that only what has already been considered can be obvious.

Clearly that makes no sense as everything has to be considered for the first time once, and therefore the truth would be that nothing has ever been obvious, because on the first instance of considering the issue its never been considered before and therefore cannot have been taught, suggested or have been motivated by anything. Ridiculous.

And as a rather ludicrous paradox, the mere fact someone has come up with solution or invention for any problem or issue virtually guarantees there was a motivation of some kind to consider the issue, otherwise the discovery or invention would have to have been pure happenstance indicating that indeed anyone might have stumbled across the invention if they had of been working in the same field as the so called invention was discovered by pure error, not a directed inventive mind but luck.

The whole previous legal definition of original was stupid and wrong, it implied that if something had never been looked to, or considered before the answer was never obvious and I think we all know that there are frequently new ideas that would be quite obvious to a majority of persons who put their minds to the task. The old definition of obvious actually meant that obvious was out because it was no where near an accurate definition.

Obvious can come out of a solution to a new idea. For example; consider email as a new idea, if the first email program had of been written up by some average coder back in the day, of average knowledge and basic abilities, lets say the program didn't even work that well, lets also say that some parts worked particularly well with the simple code used. Would such an email program deserve a patent? Is it not quite possible that the parts that did work well did so because the coding was such an obvious simple tight solution to that aspect of the program? Under the old definition of obvious if nobody had of taught, wrote or inspired the particular specific coding (which would be unlikely if it was the first ever email program )it would not be obvious, it would be patentable. I suggest that while the idea of email might be inventive in such a case the particular solution in this example was not, but it would have been found to be patentable. Unfortunately for inventors, ideas are not patentable, inventions are. SO if you have a really cool idea like time travel, you cant patent time travel itself, only a machine that could accomplish it. On the other hand if any engineer with a few good tools could build a time travel machine off the top of their head, basically the same way, that machine is not supposed to be patentable either.

The idea is, that just doing it first doesn't make the thing a patentable invention, its supposed to be not only original but truly inventive. Not just an obvious solution to a question asked for the first time.

Posted by: Cayble   Posted on: 04/30/07 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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