

Good Defensive Patents Are Bad Patents (Julian Sanchez) - joebadmo
http://www.juliansanchez.com/2011/07/28/good-defensive-patents-are-bad-patents

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bad_user
I do agree that patents are broken and we should get rid of them, but ...

    
    
         The ideal defensive patent, by contrast, is the most
         obvious one you can get the U.S. Patent Office to sign
         off on
    

No, the ideal defensive patent is NOT an obvious one, because such patents can
and do get invalidated in court quite frequently; and then you look stupid for
spending billions on useless patents.

The perfect defensive patent is one that ended up being used all over the
place. That's an entirely different matter and is not necessarily correlated
with obviousness, but rather with usefulness.

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joebadmo
I think here the relevant definition of 'obvious' is 'readily inventable
independently by competent parties.'

I.e. ideally, you want the defensive patent to be obvious _enough_ that your
likely attackers will have come up with and used it in vital processes.

Yes, usefulness is an important correlation, but obviousness is too, insofar
as obviousness is inversely proprortional to how widespread a method is.

