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Nope, you need to be quick to file. There is, however, an exception: if an invention is likely to be obvious to a person skilled in the art given access to pri
by mmastrac 4y ago
Nope, you need to be quick to file.
There is, however, an exception: if an invention is likely to be obvious to a person skilled in the art given access to prior art, the invention is not considered not patentable
- taeric 4y agoThat exception is laughably weak in bleeding edge fields. That is, if "skilled in the art" is limited in audience, then that someone else "did it first" could be reduced to them being the first to need to do it. Which is terrible in the cases where everyone that goes down a route will have to solve the same problem.
- AlbertCory 4y agoFor an in-depth analysis of "obviousness" as it applies to software: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2399580 "obvious to try" is probably what you're imagining. This is a real legal doctrine, and it's deplorably underutilized with software, as I explain. I had a patent lawyer read over this carefully, and he took particular interest in the notion that, as he put it, "software engineers have a bag of tricks they use." We all know that we do. But the legal system needs some kind of official blessing for the contents of the bag, and "our" ACM and IEEE are never going to give us one.
- bradknowles 4y agoThis method fails in fields where the patent office is explicitly forced to avoid hiring people in that field. So, they cannot reasonably know what prior art might be in that field, if for example they are not allowed to hire anyone with a CS degree, for example. Yes, that was the case for a long time. Only recently have they been allowed to hire patent examiners with CS degrees. So, yay -- fucked up USPTO, as per usual.