[vel0city]

I agree its usually not good to sprinkle legal landmines in your email history, but FWIW the obviousness standard for US patents is someone "skilled in the art", so an expert working in that field finding it obvious is failing the obviousness test.

[idiotsecant]

OK, but you get what parent post is saying. This particular example might have a technical answer but the overall point is that emails tend to lack context and are composed for brevity / convenience.

"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him." - Cardinal Richelieu

[ImPostingOnHN]

it sounded like the overall point was that, by avoiding retained communications, they could get away with something they otherwise would not be able to get away with, and should not be able to get away with (patenting something obvious)

what sort of context could be added which exonerates that behavior?

if the context exonerates it, why not have a policy of including context?

if it's somehow benign, but cited out of context, why not just provide the context?

and, if such exonerating context doesn't exist, wouldn't society prefer they not get away with patenting something obvious?

[OkayPhysicist]

It's a hell of a lot easier to not have to defend a statement made out of context than it is to do so. It's the same reason you should never, ever, under any circumstances answer any questions about anything at all coming from the police without your lawyer. Even if you are completely innocent, your words can be presented in such a manner as to call into question your honesty, at which point your rebuttal will be shrouded by distrust.

The quintessential example is an alibi. If the cops accuse me of shooting someone in SF, but I was in Berkeley at the time, I might be tempted to tell them that. But then, when they produce a faulty eye-witness, who says they saw me in SF that evening, suddenly I need to discredit that witness in order to resolve my alibi. Meanwhile, if I hadn't said anything, the witness's claim that I happened to be in the same city on the same day as the murder is nowhere near enough evidence to cause me any problems.

[ImPostingOnHN]

> If the cops accuse me of shooting someone in SF, but I was in Berkeley at the time, I might be tempted to tell them that. But then, when they produce a faulty eye-witness, who says they saw me in SF that evening, suddenly I need to discredit that witness in order to resolve my alibi.

you have an equal need to disprove the claims of a witness regardless of whether you have an alibi

additionally, regardless of whether there's a witness, all you need to do is prove you were in Berkeley to remove yourself as a suspect

so the two things (alibi, witness) seem orthogonal

[Mawr]

You don't, because the witness testimony is irrelevant on its own. Without knowing the alibi, there's no reason to think the OP being in SF is an issue at all.

See https://youtu.be/d-7o9xYp7eE?t=1255

[ffhhttt]

I think the context should be pretty obvious to most people in the engineering field.

> why not just provide the context?

Because lawyers might find ways to dismiss/challenge it?

[ImPostingOnHN]

in the example given, the lawyers finding ways to dismiss/challenge it would be a good thing, because the perpetrators in question are trying to patent something obvious, which society has decided we don't want them doing

so, the problem spurring such a policy is that they don't want to be implicated on the record in doing bad things - they want to get away with what society doesn't want them to get away with

that means the policy is bad for society.

[maffydub]

In the actual example, I don't think the engineers were trying to patent something obvious - it's just not unusual for engineers to casually throw around the word "obvious" for things that are not, and it's unwise to have that written down.

(I was the person who provided the ancedote.)

[ImPostingOnHN]

in the actual example, from the information given, I think the engineers were indeed trying to patent something obvious to them, or else they wouldn't have explicitly said it was obvious to them (speaking as an engineer)

I guess I need more convincing, 1st that there is indeed full context exonerating the "obvious" quote from meaning what the words mean, and 2nd that it wouldn't work to just provide that context to resolve the matter (e.g. if it truly is exonerating context, why wouldn't providing the context exonerate?)

when I asked for that detail, I just got a snide, uninformed remark about the answer being obvious, from someone who clearly could not come up with an answer