How obvious is obvious?

Corbett | July 28, 2007 2:07 PM

KSR v. Teleflex: The Supreme Court's Big Patent Ruling

This is a really really big deal, as it's at the same time a way to get rid of dumb patents clogging up the courts, but also kicking innovation in the balls. If you want a sense of the importance the Supreme Court ruling in KSR v. Teleflex, read this article and this article.

I liked this comment the best:

The KSR decision is the ultimate victory of the liberal arts majors over the technical people. While inventors need substantial investment backing to protect their inventions, lyricists, authors, essayists, movie makers, music composers, etc., need only to declare a copyright. Inventors must submit their work to a bureaucracy that decides if the invention is "obvious" or not. Before KSR there was, at least, established criteria for deciding the question of obviousness. That is gone now. Now the bureaucracy can do what it wants.

In the artistic fields, how would an artist feel about submitting his work to a group, operating without criteria, that would decide if the ideas expressed were totally new or had evolved from some previous ideas (the prior art) before allowing a copyright to issue?

Empty the engineering schools. Technical people dream of the day when their good idea will get them a valuable patent some day. The dream, never a guarantee, usually doesn¡¦t work out but now there is no dream at all. I shall set aside my math, physics, chemistry, and engineering resources and work on my lyrics (to be copyrighted, of course) for a great hip hop song about the 9 Supreme Court hoes.

Category: Ramble

Comments (2)

Comments

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Karl

July 31, 2007 1:24 PM

Corbett, do you work in the I.P. field?

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corbett

August 1, 2007 9:37 AM

In a way. Patent 6,640,086 is a process I invented for creating and distributing interactive media over handheld devices.

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