Comment by phkahler
7 years ago
It's been my experience that non-engineers are really poor at judging novelty. Plenty of patents are the equivalent of making a new widget and holding it together with screws. It's not a screw patent or a widget patent, the novelty is in holding the widget together with screws. Someone invents a new fastener and suddenly every product in existence can get a patent by redesigning what they have using the new fastener. Substitute "algorithm" or "data structure" for screw and you have a large slice of the world of software patents.
I've seen plenty of seemingly dumb patents myself, but most of them are legal because an application of a known technique to a new field is considered novel in patent law. So if you design an amazing new zipper for jackets, I can probably copy that, put it on a backpack, and get a patent on that and there would be nothing wrong with that legally.
Well, there's legal and there's right. They are not not always the same.
Your backpack example is a perfect illustration of my point. Thanks for that. It is a matter of degree of course, but the bar for patentability is really low IMHO. The new zipper may have been worthy of a patent, but every new instance of its use where another zipper was previously used should not be.