[law]

> I think it's quite a bit more sinister than this. As a patent lawyer confided to me once: The most valuable patents are the obvious ones (as other folks will likely think of it themselves) and that his job is to mask the fact that a patent is in fact obvious.

That lawyer should be disbarred. Obvious inventions (from the perspective of a person having ordinary skill in the art) are per se unpatentable, and merely masking this obviousness using an obtuse independent claim spawning many dependent claims is one reason why we're in this mess. I really think that a foreseeability or causation test should be used to measure obviousness, or better still, that obviousness should be a question of fact that the jury determines.

[Natsu]

The test for obviousness is... less than robust. In a quest for legal certainty, "obviousness" is tested by applying the teaching-suggestion-motivation (TSM) test[1]. While this does help to prevent hindsight bias, the fact is that people often fail to state the obvious, so there may be no record of just how obvious something was. So blindingly obvious things can and do slip through, though the Supreme Court has tried to give the courts some leeway to strike down the worst of the lot with KSR v. Teleflex (2006).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inventive_step_and_non-obvious...

[bradfeld]

Totally agree the lawyer should be disbarred. However, many patent lawyers, especially those who work for either (a) big companies, (b) patent trolls, or (c) are independent owners of patents they've purchased from others "live on this concept."

As an engineer from a large software company once told me, "our internal patent lawyers have a simple saying - write the patent to be as broad as possible while obscuring what you are actually doing."