Hacker News Reader

The solution might be to limit protection to machine code and the improvements in semiconductor design and conclude that higher level programming is routine experimentation (call it if a pimple faced teen can develop it in a hackathon it is per se obvious).

View on HN

Actually that's almost already the standard. I can't speak to the specifics of how it's enforced, but something is legally unpatentable if a pimple faced teen could develop it in a hackathon. The standard is whether it is non-obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art.

What people say the standard is is quite a different thing from what the standard actually is. Don't look at the text of the law, look at what gets patented and what doesn't. The text is irrelevant.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com