Why Shouldn Competitors Be Able To Weigh In On Patent Applications?
The patent system is only supposed to grant patents on inventions that are new and non-obvious to those skilled in the art. As we’ve pointed out in the past, the “non-obvious” part of the requirement has long been (effectively) ignored by the patent office. Instead, it mostly focused on whether the invention was new — and did so by looking at published examples of prior art. There was very little effort made to examine whether or not the concept was non-obvious, and even less to see if it was non-obvious to skilled practitioners in the field. Luckily, the Supreme Court’s decision in the Teleflex v. KSR case brought some attention back to the obviousness question, but only in one particular area (concerning combining two known concepts). However, it did little to actually establish a real test of whether or not a concept is obvious. For example, there’s still no thought given to the fact that if multiple people invent the same thing at around the same time, it seems fairly obvious that
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