The detriment of hindsight
01 September 2010
Sylvan Browne suggests a way to deal with the problem of hindsight bias when assessing the obviousness of a patent application
The patent laws of many countries require that the invention claimed in a patent or patent application be new relative to what has gone before. This is commonly described as the novelty requirement. The newness effectively means there must be difference between the invention as claimed and the citable prior art. It is also common in many countries to require that such a difference be not obvious to someone of ordinary skill in the technical art to which the invention relates. This requirement is sometimes termed the non-obviousness requirement, such as in the US, or analogously as the inventive step requirement in, for example, Australia and Europe....
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