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Okay, I name you Patent Examiner Potentate. Just a few simple questions. Are wheels obvious? How about a wheel attached to two logs (a cart)? How about fire? w

by RogerL 13y ago

Okay, I name you Patent Examiner Potentate. Just a few simple questions. Are wheels obvious? How about a wheel attached to two logs (a cart)? How about fire? woven grass to catch fish in a stream? Taking some seeds from a plant and planting them? Those completely transformed our lives, yet, for a very long time, were anything but obvious. My point is not to bicker about fire and how a patent process might have treated it, per se, but to illustrate how hard it is to recognize what is obvious or not. If no one else is doing something, in the tech field, is it because it wasn't obvious, or because the tech wasn't quite there yet? I've talked with quite a few (US) patent examiners and they are smart people, and find it anything but trivial to rule on obviousness. I'll say more about that in relation to "one click" below. The bigger issue, to my mind, is the ease of research and implementation. It doesn't cost years of research to devise 'one click'. After you have thought of it, you can hand it off to a mid-level programmer and it'll be added to your stack in a few days - and a junior programmer could've had a prototype going in 15 minutes. Contrast that to the people rightly lamenting about investing years of work into medical device, only to have it stolen from them by a bigger (or just different) company. I haven't studied the history of one click, so I could be wrong about its details. If so, please focus on the broader ideas. The argument is simply that if no one else does something for several years when it was possible, then that idea is not 'obvious', except in hindsight. With that said, I'm not crazy about extending 20 years of protection to such a trivial implementation. But how do we do that without punishing people with years of research, or just a brilliant flash of insight? I'm sure we can come up with a straw man patent (and perhaps one click is that straw man, though I don't think so), but the difficulty is in ruling on non-strawman patents.

danmaz74 13y ago
I'm quite interested in the subject of patents, and read enough about that. From what I've read about US patents examiners, it's not a problem of them not being smart. The problem is that they aren't tasked with assessing if a patent claim is "obvious to a person skilled in the art" - like they should be - but only with finding out if there is published prior art. So, to use your example: Fire shouldn't have been patentable, because it's a natural phenomenon. But if you're the first one to discover how to light a fire faster, using a bow, then definitely you should be able to patent that. In this context, one-click is neither fire nor a new way to light it. It's more like a situation where everybody is already using fire to cook freshwater fish, but nobody wrote in a recognized publication that you can also use it to cook seawater fish; and now you come and patent that.

by RogerL 13y ago

danmaz74 13y ago

I'm quite interested in the subject of patents, and read enough about that. From what I've read about US patents examiners, it's not a problem of them not being smart. The problem is that they aren't tasked with assessing if a patent claim is "obvious to a person skilled in the art" - like they should be - but only with finding out if there is published prior art. So, to use your example: Fire shouldn't have been patentable, because it's a natural phenomenon. But if you're the first one to discover how to light a fire faster, using a bow, then definitely you should be able to patent that. In this context, one-click is neither fire nor a new way to light it. It's more like a situation where everybody is already using fire to cook freshwater fish, but nobody wrote in a recognized publication that you can also use it to cook seawater fish; and now you come and patent that.