[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.