Not really, if 2 people or groups out of the millions of people who live in this country (or are on visas to work in this country) is that really an obvious inv

Not really, if 2 people or groups out of the millions of people who live in this country (or are on visas to work in this country) is that really an obvious invention? Or to make it more realistic say three or five out of an entire industry like bio-tech or web 2.0, is that obvious? Nope. It's obvious only to the few inventors. So the question becomes how do we deal with who should get the patent. Instead of relying on the different time-lines of the actual development of the idea and reducing it to practice (actually making it work or having a proof that it will work) the new law will switch us over to a "who got in line first" system. To me that's a loss for inventors and for innovation. I do think we need a major cleaning up of the patent system, but this isn't the direction we should be going...