Is putting a battery-powered pump in a water gun a non-obvious invention worthy of patent protection? Batteries, pumps and water guns all existed before this --

Is putting a battery-powered pump in a water gun a non-obvious invention worthy of patent protection? Batteries, pumps and water guns all existed before this -- what's the innovation here? This is an excellent question. Let me offer a possible answer. It seems to me that the very fact that batteries, pumps, and water guns had all existed for some time, and yet nobody until Johnson thought to put them together, in itself constitutes evidence that the idea was nonobvious. It seems to me that a lot of the problem patents we have seen in recent years involve relatively new technologies. For example, once we had low-cost scanners, and once file transmission by email became common, scan-to-email was an obvious idea. But it wasn't so obvious that one of the first people to think of it (almost certainly not the very first) wasn't able to obtain a patent on it. Therein, I think, lies the problem: when a new technology shows up, the PTO simply has no way to know what applications of it count as obvious -- it hasn't been around long enough for the obvious ones to have been thought of already. Under such circumstances the PTO should be very careful about granting patents. I think a reasonable guideline would be that once a new technology begins to be widely used, the PTO should assume that any idea that simply combines the new technology with existing techniques, or applies it to well-known problems in a straightforward way, is obvious. This would have ruled out all the "X, but on the Internet" patents we have seen go by. As I have written previously, a deeper problem with our system is this. A patent is a trade: we give the inventor a time-limited monopoly in exchange for disclosure of the invention. But there's no one unambiguously charged with making sure we got a good deal: that the value of the disclosure outweighs the cost of the monopoly. While this is technically the PTO's responsibility, its management and incentive structures aren't set up with this goal paramount. This pushes the problem to the courts; but the courts tend to defer to the PTO's judgment. So really, there's nobody minding the store.