From ramon@jl1.quim.ucm.es  Mon May  7 22:01:59 2001
From: ramon@jl1.quim.ucm.es (Ram'on Garc'ia Fern'andez)
Date: Mon, 7 May 2001 23:01:59 +0200
Subject: [Patents] consultation questions
In-Reply-To: <B71CD649.181A%pb@breese.fr>; from pb@breese.fr on Mon, May 07, 2001 at 10:46:33PM +0200
References: <20010507222117.A23076@jl1.quim.ucm.es> <B71CD649.181A%pb@breese.fr>
Message-ID: <20010507230159.A23400@jl1.quim.ucm.es>

On Mon, May 07, 2001 at 10:46:33PM +0200, Pierre Breese wrote:
> Sorry, obviousness is not something subjective. It has to be demonstrate in
> a convincing way, on basis of a proven prior art, and an argumentation. In
> Europe, we us the "problem solution approach" which is quite efficient for
> an objective demonstration of obviousness (or not obviousness).

But in practice we see these trivial patents granted and enforced
in court. For whatever reason. If patent office grant obvious
patents that means that they think that they are not obvious, and
I know that they are obvious, then there must be something subjective
to the concept of obvious.

> > I know that the Amazon 1-Click patent is obvious.
> May be. I'm not involved in this case, and I can't give you peremptorily an
> serious opinion. You can't just proclaim "AMAZON's patent claim 1" is non
> obvious. In fact, did you ever :
> 1 - Read the claims of Amazon patent ?
> 2 - Identify prior art document
> 3 - Structure a demonstration of nullity of amazon's claims based on this
> prior art ?

This is exactly the problem. Because of bureaucratic "formal" methods,
"demonstrations" of "obviousness", even if any programmer understands
that the these patents are trivial, patent offices and courts accept them
as valid. This shows that patents work at present in a manner that do
not having anything to do with the real needs of the industry.

Ramon


