[Gllug] [OT} Prior art

[Benedikt Heinen]

>> Anyway I suppose they are a source of ideas in which many software
>> patent pirates feed on.
>
> Unfortunately this isn't how patent application works.  It's very easy
> to get a patent.  I've applied[1] for a couple and got one on ideas
> which would hardly be considered inventive.


I have a follow-up question - how exactly do you define "non-obvious" for 
a patent?

Sometimes you get ideas that - in retrospect - seem bloody obvious, but
then again, nobody seemed to have come up with just the same idea in the 
years before.   (Note, I'm not talking about things like One-Click 
ordering systems, because it's obvious that everyone is trying to 
continously improve on their systems - so one-click is only a gradual step 
there...)

But what if, say, you'd have an idea for a problem that has been around 
for years - and by the time you get an idea on how to solve it, it seems 
so easy that it's hard to explain why nobody seems to have thought about 
it in the first place...?

Will a patent application for that be thrown out because people who see it 
might just go "Well, duh!", or will it go through because you can also 
point out that apparently noone has had the idea for the past few years 
when the problem it should solve was already around and people had been 
looking into it?




   Benedikt

--
                     Gaudeo te illud de me rogavisse.
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