Hacker News Reader

Comment by phicoh | Hacker News Reader

I think the test is simple:

give a bunch of experts the claims in the patent and not how the patent implements the claim.

If the experts can find a way to implement the claim in a relatively short period, then the claim is obvious and should be rejected.

Of course it is possible that a more specific claim is not obvisous. For example, if there are specific performance requirements. If the initial claims are obvisious, the inventor can try again with more narrow claims.

Another requirement that is sorely needed is that an expert in the field can actually understand the patent in a reasonable period of time.

View on HN

that's not really going to work though.. there have been (and must still be) tons of "obvious" solutions to well-known problems..

So if you could simply "give a bunch of experts the claims in the patent" and have them actually come up with something.. Well, then it'd be trivial to simply rewrite existing unsolved problems in "claim of method to solve problem" and they'd magically be able to solve it?

The problem is that obvious solutions become obvious only when they arrive, and not before.

Even framing a problem so that it can be solved is an example of this.. There are lots of problems that only appear after their solution. Before the solution, they weren't problems, but simply "how things are". Like, right now, we've not solved death, so for most people, it's not really a problem, it's just how things are.. If we solve death, future people will look back at us in disbelief: (You try to tell me people just DIED? and the entire world didn't unite to fix that? what the fuck was wrong with them? guess they got what they deserved..)

I'm just saying, that if your claims have obvious solutions, then the community has no need for your patent. The patent has to solve something that is not obvious.

For the community, it is only worth granting a patent if the community gets something back in return. And that is, solving a problem we don't know how to solve. Obviously, that can be with efficiency parameters. If the simple solution is 50% efficient and the patent claims 90%. That may be worth the patent. And everybody else can keep using the 50% efficient solution.

In your example, if you now come up with a patent that solves death, then no expert will be able to find a solution in reasonable period.

If you can then show a working version that solves death, even if it is completely obvious in retrospect, it is worth a patent.

I like this idea, but the pro-patent argument says that some things become obvious only after you see them. Once a company starts selling a product with the new idea, everyone will figure it out, and it will become part of the set of things that are obvious to experts.

In my opinion that's not what patents are about. Patents are about how to do something. The obvious purpose is that revealing your patent advances the state of the art.

Otherwise, why would the community grant a relatively long term (about 20 years) of monopoly? It doesn't make sense to do that just for a clever business idea.

I basically agree with you. The counterargument says that some innovation simply doesn't happen for centuries, until it finally occurs to someone. You want to incentivize those kinds of innovations as well, to get people to revisit old issues. For example, the stirrup. Evident once you see it, but a big innovation, or it would have shown up centuries earlier.

This is actually a FANTASTIC idea!

Reply on news.ycombinator.com