Ordinary Skill in the Art (2001)

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?

&#62;<i>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</i> //<p>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.<p>Indeed the presence of many other possible solutions makes any one solution less obvious as <i>the</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I just skimmed the second half but:<p>&#62;<i>I'd love to see public review of patents before they are granted.</i> //<p>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).