[justinsb]

I think this is a great discussion; much more productive than the normal religious arguments.

The first is reasonably sound. A potentially very interesting idea is to allow anything filed within 3 months of filing to be considered "prior art", although I'm not sure this would make a huge difference in practice.

The second would be very labor intensive if done in practice. Doing this as a thought-experiment is actually how non-obviousness is determined by patent examiners. If an engineer of "ordinary skill in the art" would think the approach obvious given the prior art, then the patent is deemed obvious. I don't know if it's ever been tried to locate 'virgin engineers' to demonstrate that a patent is obvious.

So the second idea is how the system works, although the examiner is supposed to be the group of engineers.