Thus defining "non-obviousness" is super hard to do -- because it is all context dependent and humans are like a million monkeys inventing everything that can possibly be invented in aggregate.
Thus defining "non-obviousness" is super hard to do -- because it is all context dependent and humans are like a million monkeys inventing everything that can possibly be invented in aggregate.
Those are just what I know off the top of my head from my own field. While there is plenty of incremental research in any field and plenty of situations where a motivated expert would have arrived at the same basic concept, it is not outlandishly uncommon for a truly novel, non-obvious idea to be presented. The problem for patent examiners is that they are not experts and the pace of software innovation leaves them baffled by the applications they are examining; there are also too few patent examiners to handle the volume of applications that are submitted.
One way to address the problem is to just abolish software patents entirely. Software was never meant to be patentable, at least not if you recognize software as a form of applied math (happy to argue this one all day long) and accept the idea that math is not (or should not be) patentable.
It only becomes novel due to the details of the tech. But even then you could implement the solution in various ways and I can’t imagine every potential method was patented.
So, while I agree the non-obvious can be hard to define. But with patents like this I don’t think we’ve found the right balance.
What a trash headline too. "Google doesn't want to pay for Sonos technology"...
What innovation is this? Speaker groups - has no one used a high end AV system. Zone A Zone B etc, and you have a remote etc for all this?
give a bunch of experts the claims in the patent and not how the patent implements the claim.
If the experts can find a way to implement the claim in a relatively short period, then the claim is obvious and should be rejected.
Of course it is possible that a more specific claim is not obvisous. For example, if there are specific performance requirements. If the initial claims are obvisious, the inventor can try again with more narrow claims.
Another requirement that is sorely needed is that an expert in the field can actually understand the patent in a reasonable period of time.
So if you could simply "give a bunch of experts the claims in the patent" and have them actually come up with something.. Well, then it'd be trivial to simply rewrite existing unsolved problems in "claim of method to solve problem" and they'd magically be able to solve it?
The problem is that obvious solutions become obvious only when they arrive, and not before.
Even framing a problem so that it can be solved is an example of this.. There are lots of problems that only appear after their solution. Before the solution, they weren't problems, but simply "how things are". Like, right now, we've not solved death, so for most people, it's not really a problem, it's just how things are.. If we solve death, future people will look back at us in disbelief: (You try to tell me people just DIED? and the entire world didn't unite to fix that? what the fuck was wrong with them? guess they got what they deserved..)
For the community, it is only worth granting a patent if the community gets something back in return. And that is, solving a problem we don't know how to solve. Obviously, that can be with efficiency parameters. If the simple solution is 50% efficient and the patent claims 90%. That may be worth the patent. And everybody else can keep using the 50% efficient solution.
In your example, if you now come up with a patent that solves death, then no expert will be able to find a solution in reasonable period.
If you can then show a working version that solves death, even if it is completely obvious in retrospect, it is worth a patent.
Otherwise, why would the community grant a relatively long term (about 20 years) of monopoly? It doesn't make sense to do that just for a clever business idea.
I like to explain it as similar to wheels being circles. Of course that is obvious once you see a circle shaped wheel, but the insight to do that in the first place is the novelty element.
Similar advances are happening in every little niche industry and novelty implies non-obvious.
“Control a group of speakers” - not patentable
“Control a group of speakers, but with software” - patentable
Maybe there’s some really interesting way Sonos controls speakers with software that should be patentable. But “with software” is not novel on its own.
The claim that they are obvious is based on the fact that anyone who is involved in the production of those prior incremental steps can see what can be done as the next increment. People are working on producing wheels using molds and certain materials. Across town, someone starts selling a new kind of mold or material. The "inventor" applies it to the molding of wheels.
Agree with your point though, and it may just be one of those impossible questions which is why the patent office struggles with how to make these decisions.
But when it comes to money-making patents, I think of technological development as an optimization process where everyone has the same objectives and a pretty limited search area at each point in time (available technologies you can use, textbook knowledge you can draw on). I'd generally expect any smart and dedicated person working on the problem to find the next best next steps sooner or later (certainly far less than 20 years).
Maybe take a 3rd party who is unaware of the patent/novel idea and then asking them how to solve for some generalized version of the problem that a patent states it is solving and see what happens.
Similar to black boxing that companies will do with tech that may have been shared under restricted terms.
Just do peer review and get experts' opinions. Don't tell them how to make it work, just tell them what it does. E.g. make the inventor provide a carefuully-worded abstract. By the way patents that claim the category of problem itself as the invention (as opposed to the specific method for solving the problem) are another big problem that needs to be eliminated. Those broad first claims are the ones shot down in challenges. For example "use a computer to processs transactions", or even "use a convolutional network to classify faces". These are not inventions; they are problems that still need to be solved, and it can be done many ways.
Anyway if you're uncertain about 6-months, how can you justify giving them 20 years of monopoly?