I agree its usually not good to sprinkle legal landmines in your email history, but FWIW the obviousness standard for US patents is someone "skilled in the art", so an expert working in that field finding it obvious is failing the obviousness test.
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - Cardinal Richelieu
what sort of context could be added which exonerates that behavior?
if the context exonerates it, why not have a policy of including context?
if it's somehow benign, but cited out of context, why not just provide the context?
and, if such exonerating context doesn't exist, wouldn't society prefer they not get away with patenting something obvious?
The quintessential example is an alibi. If the cops accuse me of shooting someone in SF, but I was in Berkeley at the time, I might be tempted to tell them that. But then, when they produce a faulty eye-witness, who says they saw me in SF that evening, suddenly I need to discredit that witness in order to resolve my alibi. Meanwhile, if I hadn't said anything, the witness's claim that I happened to be in the same city on the same day as the murder is nowhere near enough evidence to cause me any problems.
you have an equal need to disprove the claims of a witness regardless of whether you have an alibi
additionally, regardless of whether there's a witness, all you need to do is prove you were in Berkeley to remove yourself as a suspect
so the two things (alibi, witness) seem orthogonal
> why not just provide the context?
Because lawyers might find ways to dismiss/challenge it?
so, the problem spurring such a policy is that they don't want to be implicated on the record in doing bad things - they want to get away with what society doesn't want them to get away with
that means the policy is bad for society.
(I was the person who provided the ancedote.)
I guess I need more convincing, 1st that there is indeed full context exonerating the "obvious" quote from meaning what the words mean, and 2nd that it wouldn't work to just provide that context to resolve the matter (e.g. if it truly is exonerating context, why wouldn't providing the context exonerate?)
when I asked for that detail, I just got a snide, uninformed remark about the answer being obvious, from someone who clearly could not come up with an answer
I’m sorry but you might consider patenting your mind reading device.
It seems pretty easy to imagine engineers spending week/months/etc. solving a specific problem the solution to which might seem pretty ‘obvious’ to them when they actually manage to arrive at it. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s actually obvious ..
> wouldn't work to just provide that context to resolve the matter
Why take the risk? And even if you end up winning at the end having to prove something like that will still result in additional costs and/or delays.
Your reasoning seems to be based on vague assumptions based on a very vaguely described situation. I find it hard to understand how can someone feel so certain about it with close to zero real context.
indeed, with no detail provided, we're forced to make assumptions, or ask for detail
I chose the latter, that is why I included this in my post:
> I guess I need more convincing, 1st that there is indeed full context exonerating the "obvious" quote from meaning what the words mean, and 2nd that it wouldn't work to just provide that context to resolve the matter (e.g. if it truly is exonerating context, why wouldn't providing the context exonerate?)
when I asked for that detail, I just got a snide, uninformed remark about the answer being obvious, from someone who clearly could not come up with an answer
I would like a response to that part of the post if you feel up to providing it, please