[jhdevos]

But right now, there isn't even a way to get a patent revoked in a court because of obviousness or triviality. Prior art is basically the only way to attack a patent.

It's the entire system that is built around the assumption that 'obviousness' is too difficult to measure objectively, and that protection is vastly more important than anything else, so we should always err on the side of protection when laying the boundary of what should be patentable and what not. In other words, better to have 1000 bad patents than running the risk of having 1 idea that should be patentable being rejected by accident.

No thought is given to the enormous damage this does to our industry.

[chii]

i suppose obviousness could be 'tested' for if the end result of the patent can be deduced by only looking at the end result and not reading any of the patent filing.

[ScottBurson]

Yes, I've had this thought too. Have a panel of engineers who get to see a description of the problem the invention supposedly solves, but get no information about how it solves it. If any of them come up with the same idea within a couple of days, it was obvious.