prior art: Knight Rider

prior art: Knight Rider

Posted Mar 6, 2009 19:16 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954)
In reply to: prior art: Knight Rider by addw
Parent article: Third time is the charm?

Are we, perhaps, overlooking a great source of prior art: science fiction? Should patent busters be looking at old episodes of Star Treck & Dr Who and rereading Asimov & al ?

One of the few things I remember from my one patent law class is that you patent an invention, not an idea. An invention is "an idea reduced to practice." Or, in Thomas Edison's words, "invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." Sci Fi takes care of the inspiration, but unless Asimov also filled in all the details needed to implement it and did the testing to show that it works, it's not an invention.

That's how we come to the obviousness test: once you've realized having a computer in a car is a good way to do something (the inspiration), it's obvious that it should and could go in the dashboard, so there's presumably nothing to perspire over and nothing to patent here.

---

(Log in to post comments)