3 ms·

IMO the OP has not understood the obviousness test. Its not that a person "skilled in the art" would never make the invention, but that it would require many at

by ajb 2y ago

IMO the OP has not understood the obviousness test. Its not that a person "skilled in the art" would never make the invention, but that it would require many attempts, thus justifying the reward of a patent for their efforts. Thus it's not "obvious to a person skilled in the art" which construction will succeed. These days, of course, most software patents should fail this test.

trhway 2y ago
>reward of a patent for their efforts. no, the patent is a reward for the disclosure of it to the public (and thus supposedly for sparing the others from the "many attempts" thus speeding up the public progress) no matter how much effort you spent coming up with the invention - be it half your adult life and the life savings or you just invented it in 10 minutes. If there is no value in patent disclosure, then it shouldn't be granted. That basically means that patents are obsolete these days as there is no value in the public disclosure anymore as anything invented by a person A right now, if not disclosed, will be invented half an hour later by a person B and person C and a bunch of others. The only thing patents do these days is preventing the persons B, C and the others from using the idea that the A just happened to file first thus blocking their progress - completely opposite to the original idea that the disclosure by A would speed up the progress of the others. I mean have you ever seen somebody saying "Thanks to the person A for their patent, now i know how to accomplish that thing and will happily pay to the A the license fee as their patent saved me time and effort." ?
- MattPalmer1086 2y ago
  > That basically means that patents are obsolete these days as there is no value in the public disclosure anymore You are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Surely we don't want to return to the days when all invention had to be kept secret in order to profit from it (and potentially lost)? I do agree that trivial patents are indeed a blocker to progress, and there are far too many of them.
  - trhway 2y ago
    >Surely we don't want to return to the days when all invention had to be kept secret in order to profit from it (and potentially lost)? There is no such danger as no invention/technology on the market can be kept secret these days - anything can be reverse engineered :)
    - MattPalmer1086 2y ago
      Maybe for software, but I bet there are industrial processes which would be significantly harder. In any case, even if inventions would not be lost, there still needs to be some kind of protection to allow profiting from invention, for some period. Otherwise the competitive advantage in making progress would be severely diminished.
      - trhway 2y ago
        Musk and SpaceX for example is a counter example to your argument. Anybody is free to repeat what the SpaceX is doing. And many is trying to repeat what the Tesla is doing. Seems Musk isn't enforcing any patents. And what a remarkable boom and progress we have in deep learning, LLM, etc - everybody copies and improves upon everybody's work - precisely because various key items like transformers are either not patented or the patents aren't enforced by their owners. >Otherwise the competitive advantage in making progress would be severely diminished. The making progress is the main competitive advantage today. >protection to allow profiting from invention that means blocking others which means slowing down public progress these days - why should we do that? The patents were to the public benefit in 19th century (and even then the patent value was already starting to be of the perverse kind - ie. Diesel invented his engine to circumvent Otto's patent. Unfortunately for us the 0.9 or 1.1 click of button seems to be physically impossible.) when trained engineers and scientists were rare and expensive, and thus their work had outsized value. Today we have crowds of them.
        MattPalmer1086 2y ago
        Sure, there are maybe some things which don't need protection. The existence of counter examples doesn't invalidate the general case. Clearly, building reliable rockets is hard and takes a long time to get to profitability. Tesla is losing market share rapidly. > The making progress is the main competitive advantage today. I'm not sure what point you are making here. The competitive advantage is largely happening in a system that uses patents. My point is if you take that away, it is by no means certain that progress would remain a competitive advantage. >that means blocking others which mean slowing down public progress Only if you discount the observation that without some protection, the progress may not happen at all.

by ajb 2y ago

trhway 2y ago

>reward of a patent for their efforts. no, the patent is a reward for the disclosure of it to the public (and thus supposedly for sparing the others from the "many attempts" thus speeding up the public progress) no matter how much effort you spent coming up with the invention - be it half your adult life and the life savings or you just invented it in 10 minutes. If there is no value in patent disclosure, then it shouldn't be granted. That basically means that patents are obsolete these days as there is no value in the public disclosure anymore as anything invented by a person A right now, if not disclosed, will be invented half an hour later by a person B and person C and a bunch of others. The only thing patents do these days is preventing the persons B, C and the others from using the idea that the A just happened to file first thus blocking their progress - completely opposite to the original idea that the disclosure by A would speed up the progress of the others. I mean have you ever seen somebody saying "Thanks to the person A for their patent, now i know how to accomplish that thing and will happily pay to the A the license fee as their patent saved me time and effort." ?

MattPalmer1086 2y ago
> That basically means that patents are obsolete these days as there is no value in the public disclosure anymore You are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here. Surely we don't want to return to the days when all invention had to be kept secret in order to profit from it (and potentially lost)? I do agree that trivial patents are indeed a blocker to progress, and there are far too many of them.
- trhway 2y ago
  >Surely we don't want to return to the days when all invention had to be kept secret in order to profit from it (and potentially lost)? There is no such danger as no invention/technology on the market can be kept secret these days - anything can be reverse engineered :)
  - MattPalmer1086 2y ago
    Maybe for software, but I bet there are industrial processes which would be significantly harder. In any case, even if inventions would not be lost, there still needs to be some kind of protection to allow profiting from invention, for some period. Otherwise the competitive advantage in making progress would be severely diminished.
    - trhway 2y ago
      Musk and SpaceX for example is a counter example to your argument. Anybody is free to repeat what the SpaceX is doing. And many is trying to repeat what the Tesla is doing. Seems Musk isn't enforcing any patents. And what a remarkable boom and progress we have in deep learning, LLM, etc - everybody copies and improves upon everybody's work - precisely because various key items like transformers are either not patented or the patents aren't enforced by their owners. >Otherwise the competitive advantage in making progress would be severely diminished. The making progress is the main competitive advantage today. >protection to allow profiting from invention that means blocking others which means slowing down public progress these days - why should we do that? The patents were to the public benefit in 19th century (and even then the patent value was already starting to be of the perverse kind - ie. Diesel invented his engine to circumvent Otto's patent. Unfortunately for us the 0.9 or 1.1 click of button seems to be physically impossible.) when trained engineers and scientists were rare and expensive, and thus their work had outsized value. Today we have crowds of them.
      - MattPalmer1086 2y ago
        Sure, there are maybe some things which don't need protection. The existence of counter examples doesn't invalidate the general case. Clearly, building reliable rockets is hard and takes a long time to get to profitability. Tesla is losing market share rapidly. > The making progress is the main competitive advantage today. I'm not sure what point you are making here. The competitive advantage is largely happening in a system that uses patents. My point is if you take that away, it is by no means certain that progress would remain a competitive advantage. >that means blocking others which mean slowing down public progress Only if you discount the observation that without some protection, the progress may not happen at all.