Ordinary Skill in the Art (2001)
infolab.stanford.edu
infolab.stanford.edu
The problems they're solving are different. Patents exist to incentivize people to create new technology. If there were no patents, it's hard to justify spending lots of time and energy on new technology -- it'll just get stolen. So, the deal is that if you invent something, you get solid industrial use out of it (20 years sounds look enough to build a career), and in return, you publish comprehensive documentation about it. Contributing your knowledge to society is part of the deal.
Copyright is different. Copyrights are granted to unique, creative works -- art, that holds no value other than the value in the thing itself. There, there's nothing that would otherwise need to be hidden and protected to get use of the art. So, no need to publish docs, since you're exposing the whole thing when you disseminate anyway. But, it may be your life work, or something like that. So, you get protection from people ripping you off for your lifetime, plus long enough for people to forget about your person, leaving only the work.
Long story short, they're different processes with different societal impacts, so they get fundamentally different protections.
However, pragmatically, the real reason is that the driving force behind copyright law in the United States (and therefore in much of the world) is the Walt Disney Corporation, which has decided that it will use the full force of its political weight to ensure that no work featuring Mickey Mouse ever enters the public domain. This currently requires that the length of copyright be 70 years. However, since Steamboat Willy would under these terms become public domain in 2023, I would be willing to bet that we'll see some changes to copyright law around 2022.
Disney has no such interest in patents and, as a result, no reason to lobby for the extension of their terms.
If none of them were exactly the idea, and the skilled practitioners were tasked to present solutions that required no novel development only that which constituted the state of the art at the time, then the solution would be non-obvious.
Indeed the presence of many other possible solutions makes any one solution less obvious as the choice. There's a secondary effect that if the many solutions are equally good then they'll all be of little value whilst if the patent covers the one solution of the many that turns out to be greatly superior then it will have a much higher value.
Moreover on the subject of obviousness I always felt that should a patentee or their agent push the argument to it's logical end that "if it's obvious then why has no one already done it" appears to be an almost watertight argument.
To recapitulate, if it were obvious then others would have done it, if it were obvious and valuable it would be recorded (or patented) - in such case then a novelty citation should be available. If the subject of the application were obvious but of little value, ergo no patent had been applied for, then there would be little reason to continue to grant and little reason for a patent office to refuse and moreover little reason for a patentee to pay renewal costs. The result then is that if there is no novelty citation the patent office has no case [to push obviousness] or reason to practically pursue such a case. YMMV.
I just skimmed the second half but:
>I'd love to see public review of patents before they are granted. //
This is why there is early publication. Practitioners have chance to file observations before USPTO or UKIPO or who ever before grant that the examiner can take in to account. In short there already is public review. Many many times there's been a story on Slashdot with commenters aghast at what the USPTO are granting now the kerfuffle has been over an A-publication and then usually the scope has been assumed to be only limited to the title (rather than the claims).