Comment by tzs

I once attended a patent trial and it was interesting. The defendant claimed the patent was obvious.

The plaintiff had some pretty good evidence that it was in fact not obvious:

• The defendant was one of the largest companies in the field with a very accomplished and impressive R&D department. The plaintiff introduced documents they got from the defendant during discovery where the CEO had called solving the specific problem that the patent solved to be vital to the future existence of their company and made solving it a top priority. Yet they failed to make any progress on it.

• Two of the other largest companies in the field, also with impressive R&D departments, had also been working on this and failed to come up with anything.

The jury found that the patent was obvious.

What I think happened is that both plaintiff and defendant had presentations that explained to the jury what the patent did. Both presentations did a great job of finding a problem from everyday life that was kind of analogous to the problem the patent involved, and translating the patent's solution to that everyday life problem. The presentations made it easy to understand the gist of what the patent did.

There's a natural tendency to mistake easy to understand for obviousness, and I think that by explaining the invention in a way that made it easy to understand it also made the jury think it was obvious.

But if you don't explain the invention in a way that the jury can understand how are they supposed to be able to make decisions?

This reminds me of college. Many a time I'd read some theorem named after a mathematician and think "how the heck does this obvious theorem get named after someone?". The answer is that it wasn't at all obvious when that mathematician proved it 400 years ago. I'm seeing it after 400 years of people figuring out how to present the subject in a way that makes that theorem obvious.

That reminds me of a classic math joke: A professor says "It is obvious that" and writes an equation. Then he pauses, and says "...wait, is that obvious?". He goes to another board and starts deriving the equation, not saying anything while doing this. After 20 minutes he had gotten it, says "I was right! It is obvious!" and goes back and resumes his lecture.