HACKER Q&A
📣 O__________O

Example of Useful and Novel, but Obvious


While I understand the intent of “non-obvious” being a requirement for patentability — in practice find it hard believe something would be useful and novel, but obvious. All the examples I have seen to me appear to just lack novelty.

Anyone able to provide an example of something that would fall into the category of useful and novel, but obvious - where being obvious is the only reasoning for being non-patentable?

  👤 AnimalMuppet Accepted Answer ✓
The patentability standard is non-obvious to one ordinarily skilled in the art. If it's useful, and obvious, then it's already used - it's not novel.

There is no situation I can conceive of where people are saying "Sure, we should do X. It's obvious that it would be better. But we're going to do Y instead anyway." I mean, a company might do that. But everybody in the whole "trade"? Not if there's any competition.

What usually happens instead is "X is clearly better than Y, but we can't use that because of Z" (where Z is cost, safety, durability, reliability, maintainability, regulation, or whatever). Then someone figures out how to do X without Z being an issue, and that's what gets patented, because that part wasn't obvious.

👤 Someone
IANAL, but in patent law, novel means there is no single prior patent covering all aspects of the newly claimed patent; non-obvious means it’s not possible to arrive at the claimed invention by combining a few prior patents.

So, if there are patents for a horse-drawn cart (with two wheels), and for carriages (with four wheels), the idea of a horse-drawn carriage with four wheels is novel, but obvious.

I’m not claiming it works as intended, but the idea behind that is to prevent a combinatorial explosion of patents (“oxen-drawn cart with a bench to sit on”, “horse-drawn carriage with a cover against the sun”, “oxen-drawn carriage with a bench to sit on and a cover against rain and sun”, etc)

So, it’s not about being obvious to laymen (that’s hard to decide upon, anyways, as many inventions are trivial once you know of their existence)