from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
- n. The characteristic of being obvious.
from The Century Dictionary and Cyclopedia
- n. The state or condition of being obvious, plain, or evident to the eye or the mind.
- n. The state of being open or liable, as to anything threatening or harmful.
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- n. the property of being easy to see and understand
I agree with #3 – this rivals in obviousness the idea of using 1-click to buy something online, which resulted in interminable squabbling and litigation about who thought of such an obvious thing first. —
His penchant for exploitive obviousness is in full tow.
The issue of obviousness is somewhat of a red herring.
My tolerance for such obviousness is low right now.
The claim has a certain surface plausibility, but it’s usually awfully hard to keep a straight face when contemplating particular examples, and the grounds for insisting that your retrospective intuition of obviousness is mistaken almost always amounts to pointing out that the first guy to file the patent was — they’ll keep saying it until you grasp this thorny concept — the first guy to file the patent.
But pre-KSR precedent refutes Plaintiffs' theory of non-obviousness, which is that the costs of the coating process would have dissuaded a skilled formulator from combining the references.
Perhaps instead of discussing which is the "more obvious" interpretation, which ultimately doesn't prove anything since "obviousness" is a matter of perception, we should be focusing on the relevant contextual and comparative information.
Since business method patents like that have had a very poor success rate in the wild, and the recent Supreme Court ruling has made "obviousness" mean "obviousness" again, if he tries to enforce it, he'll get smacked in the face with the rolled-up newspaper of reality.
It cannot be stressed strongly enough that "obviousness" is a legal concept that is completely independent of "patentable subject matter."
… This is the kind of obviousness that a child can see.