[jandrewrogers]

I think there are two different cases that often look similar in practice. The first is when the invention is obvious to everyone but no effort is spent on development because it would have no value until adjacent technologies reach a certain level of maturity. The second is when the adjacent technologies have been mature for some time but there is a critical problem that needs a key insight to bring it all together. To an outsider these cases often look identical, the difference is that the former case was obvious in foresight and the latter case has a tendency to look obvious only in hindsight, but only a reasonably objective subject matter expert can make this distinction.

The latter case is a litmus test of non-obviousness -- all the pieces were there for some time but no one had put them together. It is distinct from when everyone puts the pieces together the second the pieces are available.

Patent clerks can't tell the difference.

I will say that the state-of-the-art for geospatial computing in the 1990s was pretty damn primitive, many useful things had not been invented yet. It isn't great today but it has come a long way.

[dboreham]

Based on my experience working as a consultant to patent litigators, it's worse than that. I dove pretty deep over a few beers with these guys on this subject. What they told me is that in the US patent system, you can pretty much forget about using obviousness as a defense. Yes it exists as a concept but if you intend to use it, you'll probably lose so they never try to use it.

Hence the focus on prior art.

[jandrewrogers]

Obviousness is not obvious. It requires an incredibly deep level of subject matter expertise to even make that determination.

[touisteur]

And. Some solutions that seem very obvious in retrospect can be the result of years of shaking down kinks, letting expert intuition crystalize, until something almost 'dumb' fixes into an invention.

Obviousness is the wrong caliper here, I think.

[heavenlyblue]

I don't have any experience working as a consultant, but how do you define obviousness?

IF there's plenty of prior art, then it's easy to define why something is "obvious" - it had been done may times before.

[dboreham]

The lawyers define it as: the constant "false". There is never any such thing as obvious as far as the rules of their game are concerned.