[Patents] Re: [Patents] Re: Patents digest, Vol 1 #162 - 2 msgs

[Tom Vogt tom.vogt@ricardo.de]

> > and I'm willing to
> > be a years wage that it does a great job at obfuscating the fact that
> > what they want to patent is a trivial piece of software that, for
> > example, took me all of 9 lines of code(!) to duplicate.
> 
> The patent systems attempt to filter out the "obvious" inventions. But the
> oviousness criterion is applied at the initial idea level, not at the
> implementation level; i.e. it is not because an invention is easy to
> implement that it was obvious to have the initial idea.

note that I'm not aiming for "obvious" above. the 7val patent was
obvious, in retrospect. it also seems there is massive prior art, though
none it has done EXACTLY what the 7val stuff does.

what I'm aiming at is "trivial". it's the same as "innovative". if my
innovation takes anyone with a clue all of three minutes to duplicate,
it is simply insane to grant me a 20 year exclusive monopoly on it. or
even a 3 year, for that matter.