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Good Defensive Patents Are Bad Patents (Julian Sanchez)
- bad_user 15y agoI do agree that patents are broken and we should get rid of them, but ... The ideal defensive patent, by contrast, is the most obvious one you can get the U.S. Patent Office to sign off on No, the ideal defensive patent is NOT an obvious one, because such patents can and do get invalidated in court quite frequently; and then you look stupid for spending billions on useless patents. The perfect defensive patent is one that ended up being used all over the place. That's an entirely different matter and is not necessarily correlated with obviousness, but rather with usefulness.
- joebadmo 15y agoI think here the relevant definition of 'obvious' is 'readily inventable independently by competent parties.' I.e. ideally, you want the defensive patent to be obvious enough that your likely attackers will have come up with and used it in vital processes. Yes, usefulness is an important correlation, but obviousness is too, insofar as obviousness is inversely proprortional to how widespread a method is.