Thursday, May 03, 2007

US Supreme Court raises bar for obviousness in patents

Until now, the obviousness test was defined as non-obvious "to a person having ordinary skills". This allowed for rather low standards of obviousness and there are a lot of patents that are simply blocking innovation. The latest decision makes mere combination of existing technologies fail the test.



May be one day we will see the length of exclusivity granted under a patent depend on the industry it is in. A patent about cars is useful for 20 years. A patent on software (which shouldn't be patentable anyways) is not.





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