The most valuable patents are the worst patents: the ideas that everyone else will come up with on their own and only later discover that they infringe when it

The most valuable patents are the worst patents: the ideas that everyone else will come up with on their own and only later discover that they infringe when it's too late to do anything about it. Oddly enough, the fact that something is repeatedly reinvented independently does not appear to have any bearing on whether a patent fails the legal 'obviousness' test, because everyone is assumed to know about every patent (in the sense that they won't believe that you came up with it on your own even if you did), in spite of the fact that you get punished for having any knowledge thereof.