YouTube's Insight on Obviousness

Here's some interesting knowledge that I gained about Obviousness.

From Peer to Patent - What is prior art?

Before an application can be issued, the potential patent needs to be compared to prior art, which helps the patent examiner see whether a patent's claims are new, usable, and non-obvious. The three main qualities of prior art are that this work should be published, it should come before the date of the invention, and prior art must relate to a specific claim in the patent application that's being reviewed. 

Anticipation of prior art, infringement in a time machine invention- Patents, Inventions and Ideas

A scenario between two friends regarding a time machine describes that anticipation and infringement are both dependent on time. If a person copies another person's invention, but the original creator has not published a patent for his idea, than this other person can legally patent the original inventor's idea. This did not occur in this video, as Julie copied the original inventor's patent AFTER the original person had filed her patent, so Julie's patent application was rejected on the counts of infringement and anticipation of her prior art. The main takeaway of this video is: that which infringes if later, anticipates if earlier.



Novelty and Non-obviousness

In this video from Goldstein Patent Law, Attorney Goldstein clearly describes the two main requirements for an idea to be patented: novelty and non-obviousness. For an idea to be novel, it must have nothing exactly like it in prior art. The second characteristic is that the invention needs to be non-obvious, or a significantly different invention or addition to the previous patent that is not a predictable leap that people in that respective field would easily come up with on their own.