[SATLUG] Patents

[Bruce Dubbs]

Hector Bojorquez wrote:
> just a question though...
> Was the mouse ever obvious...until it was created? Were GUIs?
> We're quick to jump on this because of MS... but ... it's worth more
> consideration...

Lets talk about the mouse.  It was first designed in 1963(!) by Doug
Englebart.  By the way, this was quite a bit pre-PARC.  Obviously any
patent (I don't think there was one) wold have expired around 1980 or
so.  He was a researcher.  Once the idea of a mouse with a button
attached is invented, is it a new idea worth patenting to add a second
button?  If we have a trackball and a mouse, is it innovative to put a
scroll wheel on a Mouse?  How about a slider?

How about combining a track ball and a keyboard?

Under the overturned ideas of the patent appeals court, they would be
patentable, but they seem pretty obvious combinations of prior technology.

The point is that combining known techniques that someone "skilled in
the art" would utilize to solve a problem should not be allowed:

"These advances, once part of our shared knowledge, define a new
threshold from
which innovation starts once more. And as progress beginning from higher
levels of achievement is expected in the normal course, the results of
ordinary innovation are not the subject of exclusive rights under the
patent laws. Were it otherwise patents might stifle, rather than
promote, the progress of useful arts. See U. S. Const., Art. I, §8, cl. 8."

  -- Bruce