> ...has made non-obviousness a dead letter by usually declaring nothing obvious except the exact prior art itself and raising the standards of proof sky-high.

> ...has made non-obviousness a dead letter by usually declaring nothing obvious except the exact prior art itself and raising the standards of proof sky-high. This is not true, of course. The thing is (and I'm sure you know this) that the law defines "obviousness" as the combination of two or more prior art references, which differs from how we colloquially understand the word. This is for several reasons, the primary ones being objectiveness and avoiding hindsight. In fact, I theorize that the latter is precisely why people think they see "so many obviously redundant and unoriginal patents".