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This has always bothered me. The standard is supposed to be "non-obvious to an expert in the field" and yet they hand out patents like candy for things that ar
by gozur88 9y ago
This has always bothered me. The standard is supposed to be "non-obvious to an expert in the field" and yet they hand out patents like candy for things that are obvious to the most casual observer.
My solution is to cap the number of patents granted every year to, say, 1000. Patents would be ranked from least to most obvious and actual prior art investigation would take place (because the number is manageable). The ones below the cap would be unpatentable.
- patrickmay 9y agoAs I said in response to a comment upthread, the existence of an implementation by someone who had no knowledge of the patent should be prima facie evidence that the idea is obvious to an expert in the field. That should get the patent invalidated.
- Karunamon 9y agoThe problem there is that you're trying to prove a negative, which is probably even harder than proving a patent is obvious. Say Johnny Evilguy digs up your widget from the USPTO database from a Tor connection and then re-implements it. Poof, your patent is dead, and you can't prove he read it.
- gozur88 9y agoKarunamon is right - it would be virtually impossible to prove the second implementer never looked at the patent database. Beyond that, over time things that were novel are no longer novel as the direction of technical development changes, so the timing would be important as well.