
Ordinary Skill in the Art (2001) - ivoflipse
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~ullman/pub/focs00.html
======
gabemart
Slightly off topic - can anyone explain why a patent, which often involves a
great deal of research expenditure and is vetted through a long and expensive
process, is granted for 20 years, but copyright, which covers almost any form
of creative expression and is granted automatically with virtually no minimum
standard, lasts for the lifetime of the author plus 70 years?

~~~
trjordan
From my intro-college-course understanding...

The problems they're solving are different. Patents exist to incentivize
people to create new technology. If there were no patents, it's hard to
justify spending lots of time and energy on new technology -- it'll just get
stolen. So, the deal is that if you invent something, you get solid industrial
use out of it (20 years sounds look enough to build a career), and in return,
you publish comprehensive documentation about it. Contributing your knowledge
to society is part of the deal.

Copyright is different. Copyrights are granted to unique, creative works --
art, that holds no value other than the value in the thing itself. There,
there's nothing that would otherwise need to be hidden and protected to get
use of the art. So, no need to publish docs, since you're exposing the whole
thing when you disseminate anyway. But, it may be your life work, or something
like that. So, you get protection from people ripping you off for your
lifetime, plus long enough for people to forget about your person, leaving
only the work.

Long story short, they're different processes with different societal impacts,
so they get fundamentally different protections.

~~~
akavi
A very reasonable argument.

However, pragmatically, the real reason is that the driving force behind
copyright law in the United States (and therefore in much of the world) is the
Walt Disney Corporation, which has decided that it will use the full force of
its political weight to ensure that no work featuring Mickey Mouse ever enters
the public domain. This currently requires that the length of copyright be 70
years. However, since Steamboat Willy would under these terms become public
domain in 2023, I would be willing to bet that we'll see some changes to
copyright law around 2022.

Disney has no such interest in patents and, as a result, no reason to lobby
for the extension of their terms.

------
pbhjpbhj
> _is the question of what happens if the 100 people come up with 10 or 100
> different solutions, all or most of which are at least as good as the
> patented idea, and yet few if any are exactly that idea_ //

If none of them were exactly the idea, and the skilled practitioners were
tasked to present solutions that required no novel development only that which
constituted the state of the art at the time, then the solution would be non-
obvious.

Indeed the presence of many other possible solutions makes any one solution
less obvious as _the_ choice. There's a secondary effect that if the many
solutions are equally good then they'll all be of little value whilst if the
patent covers the one solution of the many that turns out to be greatly
superior then it will have a much higher value.

Moreover on the subject of obviousness I always felt that should a patentee or
their agent push the argument to it's logical end that "if it's obvious then
why has no one already done it" appears to be an almost watertight argument.

To recapitulate, if it were obvious then others would have done it, if it were
obvious and valuable it would be recorded (or patented) - in such case then a
novelty citation should be available. If the subject of the application were
obvious but of little value, ergo no patent had been applied for, then there
would be little reason to continue to grant and little reason for a patent
office to refuse and moreover little reason for a patentee to pay renewal
costs. The result then is that if there is no novelty citation the patent
office has no case [to push obviousness] or reason to practically pursue such
a case. YMMV.

I just skimmed the second half but:

> _I'd love to see public review of patents before they are granted._ //

This is why there is early publication. Practitioners have chance to file
observations before USPTO or UKIPO or who ever before grant that the examiner
can take in to account. In short there already is public review. Many many
times there's been a story on Slashdot with commenters aghast at what the
USPTO are granting now the kerfuffle has been over an A-publication and then
usually the scope has been assumed to be only limited to the title (rather
than the claims).

