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by JumpCrisscross 5091 days ago
If "some things are obviously obvious" that implies there is an objective (or universal subjective) criterion for judging obviousness. What would this be?

Note that a lot of brilliance looks obvious ex post facto because one is looking up the branch and seeing only one branch instead of down it and the bifurcations.
1 comments
ajross 5091 days ago
No. You're arguing precisely the fallacy I tried to refute. The fact that you personally (or any given judge or patent officer) didn't think of something isn't reasonable grounds for making it non-obvious, which is a technical (legally "objective", if not logically) distinction.

So if you want to make that case, make it. Show me the "brilliance" in Slide-to-Unlock that makes it a unique flower worthy of protection. Don't hide behind platitudes.

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tedunangst 5090 days ago
Show me the "brilliance" in Slide-to-Unlock that makes it a unique flower worthy of protection.

It's not clear how one would do this. You could reply to any evidence presented "meh, not impressed." Your position is basically the mirror of the fallacy you're arguing against. The fact that you personally are not impressed doesn't make it non-obvious either. [oops, meant obvious]

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ajross 5090 days ago
Certainly it can be done for some inventions. The RSA cryptosystem patent comes to mind as something that even experts wouldn't have seen. Likewise much of the original work on image compression, etc... You don't have to look that far to find brilliance -- we're swimming in it. So again, that just sounds like a platitude to me. Rather than try to defend the nonsense, you're hiding behind the fact that you can't be proven wrong.

Or conversely: the world you apparently want to live in is one where "protectable innovation" is cheap and worthless. Every simple improvement on an existing system becomes someone's property. Do you really want that? I don't think you do -- I think, frankly, that you want every simple improvement made by Apple Computer to be protectable. Prove me wrong. I don't think you can. :)

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tedunangst 5090 days ago
RSA is an interesting example, because that definitely seems to fall into the territory of "you can't patent math". "Oh, it's just some multiplication, how hard can it be? You can fit the whole thing on a single whiteboard."
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ajross 5090 days ago
You're on a tangent. The point wasn't whether or not RSA is patentable (it was patented, obviously, though it was released to the public and would have expired by now anyway). It's that even among people ("experts in the field", legally) who understand modular exponentiation and can implement RSA correctly, the discovery of public key encryption represents a sublime moment of brilliance. I certainly never would have seen it, nor do I know anyone who claims they would have. Your point was that this kind of certainty didn't exist, and thus you're wrong (or else you're actually claiming that you think RSA was an obvious innovation, in which case let me compose myself before continuing...)

Even to someone (Hi!) who thinks all software patents are bad, RSA is patentable if anything is patentable. Slide to unlock, not even remotely so.

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JumpCrisscross 5091 days ago
Patents aren't granted for brilliance, merely novelty. This is good - novelty is objective, "brilliance" or "obviousness" are not. Thus it makes sense to default novelty to being non-obvious and deal with the exceptions on a case-by-case basis. The forum democratic societies do this in is the court system.
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esolyt 5090 days ago
Actually, novelty implies non-obviousness. So you can't possibly think novelty is objective but obviousness is subjective.
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