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Authored by: Anonymous on Friday, July 13 2012 @ 03:48 PM EDT |
Well, it certainly speaks to the issue of obviousness...
But you have to watch out for independent learning. Party A discovers that it's
better to do something in a non-obvious way. Journalist B publishes it.
Software engineer C reads the article. He later tells co-worker D that
"this is the best way to do that". Co-worker D goes to work for
company E. When E implements that feature, they do it in the way the patent
explains, because "everybody knows that's the best way to do it."
But, in this case, they didn't know it without the patent.
On the other hand, if nobody published an article on it, and E implemented it
that way anyway, because it's the blindingly obvious way to do it, then the
patent gave us nothing (beyond a license to extortion).
But telling the two apart is going to be hard. Doing so in a court case, where
lawyers are desperately trying to make them look alike, is going to be even
harder...
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