This article is confused about the obviousness standard and the meaning of the phrase "person having ordinary skill in the art" (PHOSITA). The phrase is a legal

This article is confused about the obviousness standard and the meaning of the phrase "person having ordinary skill in the art" (PHOSITA). The phrase is a legal concept, kind of like the "reasonable person" standard in other areas of law. Think about the number of things in your job that you use uncritically. Maybe they could be optimized with a lot of effort, but none have a specific, obviously busted thing worth stopping to fix. That's what "non-obvious" means in the patent sense. It's not that PHOSITA are less creative or intelligent, it's that the ordinary practice don't require applying that creativity and intelligence to the problem the patent solves. The whole idea behind patents is that it incentivizes people to invest time in improving workflows. There's still subjectivity, but if there's an improvement over the state of the art that no one has made before and there's no hard evidence suggesting that everyone in practice was about to make the improvement, then most patent offices will consider that improvement non-obvious. Or, stated in the European way: obviousness isn't about whether people of ordinary skill could come up with the invention, it's whether they would come up with the invention had it not been patented (this is the "could-would" standard). The canonical cases—both of which the Supreme Court found to be obvious—are a 1999 patent application for replacing the hydrolics connected to a car's gas petal with a microcontroller, and a 1950 patent for adding shock absorbers to a plow (just as tractors hit the general market). In both cases, the Supreme Court said those patents were obvious, but the fact those cases made it so far suggests they're right on the line.