Overanalyzed

Education or Ineducation

November 8, 2009 at 4:22 pm | In Business, Politics, Science | No Comments
by Chris Davenport

I’ve been bugged for years over this problem of inventing things that already exist.

For example, I may spend a great deal of time working on a concept, and arrive at an inventive solution, only to discover, when telling someone else about it, that it’s already been invented.

I myself have done that to others, told them their ideas already exist. I know Jeffy’s come up with a few.

After my most recent encounter with this problem, while working with a NAT traversal technique, I became annoyed at my education.

I’m wondering whether because I am not fully briefed and up to date with the goings-on of the fields in which I am attempting to create, I need to pursue a greater education, and evaluating what I’ve already had as incomplete.

But today I was reading a comic, and another possibility occurred to me. Independent Invention and Non-obviousness.

Theoretically issued patents have satisfied the non-obvious clause, so any joe contemporary in the field shouldn’t be able to come up with it. But maybe when I spend days thinking about it, and come up with an answer, it still counts as non-obvious.

But it’s still independent invention. It seems to me that creating something that happens to be patented by others but totally unknown to you should still count. Still allow you to benefit from it, and possibly now fail the obviousness test.

Under that logic, someone who is only partially educated in the field experiences greatest advantage. On one hand, they’re not familiar with pre-existing solutions to the problems they’re encountering, so they waste time working on them. On the other, they could reinvent just about anything and use it carefree. But if we are to consider development of the field, and we assume that we’re fully versed, all the new technology is in non-obvious development along the same paths as have already been followed. History tells us that while much development happens along these lines, it is more the natural progression of the field than the sort of developmental leap that tends to happen when not versed.

There seems to be a natural point at which an invention is no longer non-obvious, and the point at which it is independently invented would seem to qualify. More to the point, techniques that would otherwise be considered public domain, and presumably taught in schools,

Under current law, that’s still infringement.