Re:Apple v. Samsung - Meet the foreman of the jury
by georgemcbay on Saturday August 25, 2012 @01:55PM
(#4432684)
> Many things become "obvious" after they have entered commercial production, but are not obvious at the time they are invented.
I totally disagree. Most things are obvious to many practitioners in a field at the time they were invented and if they weren't invented by one person would be invented by another within a very short time period. This is a natural consequence of the progression of technology and "standing on the shoulders of giants". History is absolutely littered with simultanous invention of ideas by multiple people simply as a consequence of the state of knowledge when they were actively working, with things like the calculus being obvious examples.
Of course, there are VERY rarely inventions where the leap made was well further than average, but those are very rare and certainly not the realm of patents like "bounce scrolling" which is obvious once you have a highly responsive touchscreen.
> The car is obvious now, for instance.
Who "invented" the car? Cugnot? Anderson? Benz? Daimler? Maybach? Marcus? Selden? Duryea?
Basically all of the above and around the same time (at least relative to the day when the Internet didn't broadcast news instantly around the globe), because the invention of various motors small enough to be mobile made a powered transportation vehicle an obvious goal. That doesn't mean there wasn't technical invention in everyone's different methods, but "the car" was totally obvious, just like "bounce scrolling" is, except "bounce scrolling" is a worse thing to allow to be patented because there are a very limited number of mathematical ways in which you would want to model that and so now you're basically patenting a very obvious idea plus a tiny bit of math (which shouldn't be allowed).
I totally disagree. Most things are obvious to many practitioners in a field at the time they were invented and if they weren't invented by one person would be invented by another within a very short time period. This is a natural consequence of the progression of technology and "standing on the shoulders of giants". History is absolutely littered with simultanous invention of ideas by multiple people simply as a consequence of the state of knowledge when they were actively working, with things like the calculus being obvious examples.
Of course, there are VERY rarely inventions where the leap made was well further than average, but those are very rare and certainly not the realm of patents like "bounce scrolling" which is obvious once you have a highly responsive touchscreen.
> The car is obvious now, for instance.
Who "invented" the car? Cugnot? Anderson? Benz? Daimler? Maybach? Marcus? Selden? Duryea?
Basically all of the above and around the same time (at least relative to the day when the Internet didn't broadcast news instantly around the globe), because the invention of various motors small enough to be mobile made a powered transportation vehicle an obvious goal. That doesn't mean there wasn't technical invention in everyone's different methods, but "the car" was totally obvious, just like "bounce scrolling" is, except "bounce scrolling" is a worse thing to allow to be patented because there are a very limited number of mathematical ways in which you would want to model that and so now you're basically patenting a very obvious idea plus a tiny bit of math (which shouldn't be allowed).