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Comment by reginaldjcooper | Hacker News Reader

Non-obviousness to someone working primarily in that field is a good start to determining the line.

We get most riled up by scan-to-email or click-here-for-full-version patents. The idea that you could independently come up with an obvious solution like clicking to upgrade and then need to pay some shitbird for the privilege of implementing it is despicable.

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Is a pneumatic squirt gun with integrated pump really a huge innovation? If you gave an engineer a task of building a hand-held water gun that shoots more than 50 feet, how many wouldn't think of something similar? The first patent for a compressed air squirt gun toy was 1949 [1] and the Cosmic Liquidator (1977) [2] enjoyed moderate commercial success (the market for high-end $6 squirt guns was limited; everything else was $3). (Johnson's patent cited these.) Shooting water with compressed air has a long history, nor is putting the pump on the device (air pellet guns have done this for a while, for example).

While the Super Soaker was a wildly successful product, it was still an incremental combination of existing technologies (moving the tank from a backpack to the gun and borrowing pump ergonomics from air guns). Is it really fundamentally different from the software engineer that puts together existing packages with some tasteful glue code?

[1] http://forums.sscentral.org/showthread.php?t=4019 [2] http://www.isoaker.com/Armoury/Analysis/1978/cosmicliquidato...

i think it takes some leap of imagination to think of kids having fun with this kind of toy. it's engineering plus toys plus the confidence to know that it will be massively successful so you pursue it all the way and get a patent.

it's more of an innovation than something like Bratz, which itself is somewhat of an innovation. what does it take for you to make Bratz in a world of barbies? it really does take imagination, a lot of thinking, and a lot of experience, i think.

"There will be a market for it" is not really my idea of an engineering innovation.

i don't think that's an engineering innovation either.

Patents are not exclusively about engineering.

But he figured out how to make it cheaply enough to sell as a toy. I'd guess there was some actual innovation there.

As someone who grew up without Super Soakers, and saw them hit the market, yes, it was a very novel product. Fundamentally, individual elements existed in other products already, but the actual product was most definitely a leap in squirt gun tech (e.g. pneumatic water/air rockets).

The biggest innovation I recall in squirt guns was using a battery-powered pump to create a fairly pathetic, but "automatic" stream. And how long were squirt guns around before then?

Yes, there's a whole world of difference between developing a pressurized self-contained water pistol and a vague all-encompassing concept like "cloud backup".

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