But if multiple people (or groups) actually come up with it around the same time, shouldn't that demonstrate rather clearly that it's too obvious to go handing out a monopoly on?
I wish more people would remember that a patent is supposed to be compensation for publishing, because that's supposed to be a win for society over having an invention live and die as a trade secret. But there is no market force ensuring the price of licensing a patent is less than the cost of having each competitor in the industry independently re-create the invention. Too often it's just rent-seeking on the straightforward solution any skilled practitioner would have reached, once they got around to considering the problem.
Yeah, the patent itself is quid pro quo, not just a windfall for the patentee. That's why it (theoretically) has to describe the best mode for practicing the invention, in enough detail that anyone skilled in the art can understand and use it. It's also why prior art only counts if it was published somewhere.
Not really, if 2 people or groups out of the millions of people who live in this country (or are on visas to work in this country) is that really an obvious invention? Or to make it more realistic say three or five out of an entire industry like bio-tech or web 2.0, is that obvious? Nope. It's obvious only to the few inventors.
So the question becomes how do we deal with who should get the patent. Instead of relying on the different time-lines of the actual development of the idea and reducing it to practice (actually making it work or having a proof that it will work) the new law will switch us over to a "who got in line first" system. To me that's a loss for inventors and for innovation. I do think we need a major cleaning up of the patent system, but this isn't the direction we should be going...
