Assignment 7 Part 1- Explanation of Obviousness

Assignment  7 Part 1- Explanation of Obviousness

In defining obviousness we need to look at the difference between Novelty and Obviousness.
Novelty is being able to look at a single prior art and saying something along the lines of "this is basically the same thing", or "anyone with a basic knowledge of this field could have made this new product using this singular prior art" an example of this would be if someone makes a titanium bottle with a screw on top and tries to patent it when there is an identical patent that exists for an identical bottle that is instead made out of aluminum. In this case the titanium bottle would not be considered novel.

For something to be considered Obvious it goes through basically the same process, although multiple prior arts may be used and combined to argue that someone with a basic knowledge of the field could easily think of and make this change. To illustrate an example, imagine there is a new material for coating the underside of boats that is more resistant to erosion from sea water which is patented, and a specific wake board design which is patented. If someone comes along and tries to patent an identical wake board from the prior art with the sole difference that it is coated in this erosion resistant material it would be considered obvious. By simply combining these two prior arts it is fairly obvious that the coating used on a boat could be effectively used on any aquatic instrument and thus this "invention" could have reasonably done by anyone using the information given in these two prior arts.

The catch with this one is that the more prior arts needed and the more diverse their fields are, the less obvious the invention becomes. So a product using 20 prior arts from fields ranging from astrophysics to mobile gaming to carpentry would probably be considered non obvious opposed to something with 2-4 prior arts all in the mobile gaming industry. While Obviousness seems to be subjective term, this is a relatively more objective way to make this all together subjective decision.