As discussed previously on the blog, to show that your invention is better than other products, it’s necessary to test your invention in a comparative experiment. Proving that your invention is quantitatively better than existing products in some respect is a significant milestone towards securing a patent.
However, it isn’t enough to just show that your invention is measurably better than existing alternatives.
Improving on existing inventions won’t produce a patentable product if the changes are obvious.
We often think of inventions as being better because they’re bigger, smaller, faster, or stronger. But dropping a larger engine in a car and saying, “Voila, I have invented a faster car” isn’t going to cut it with the Patent Office.
The reason such an innovation isn’t patentable is because it’s obvious. If a skilled person could duplicate your efforts based on logical deductions and a bit of work, then your invention isn’t patentable.
As 35 U.S. Code § 103 puts it:
A patent for a claimed invention may not be obtained… if the differences between the claimed invention and the prior art are such that the claimed invention as a whole would have been obvious before the effective filing date of the claimed invention to a person having ordinary skill in the art to which the claimed invention pertains.
Applications that don’t meet the above specification often involve the tweaking of a variable to produce improvements that a skilled and knowledgeable person would expect. These are considered to be “obvious” inventions, and thus unpatentable. Examples include:
- Replacing a material with a harder material in order to produce a more wear-resistant product.
- Adding black coloration to an object to improve heat transfer.
- Adjusting the ratio of ingredients in a mixture to alter a reaction.
- Installing a spring in a machine to absorb shock. (This was actually the subject of a rather momentous lawsuit against John Deere that helped to codify the question of obviousness in patent applications.)
An invention doesn’t have to be obvious to a layman in order for it to be considered obvious.
While the examples above are rather simple, complex patent applications have been dismissed because they relied on well-understood properties of physics, science, engineering, etc. The bar for obviousness is that if a skilled person could anticipate the benefits of an inventor’s innovation, then the invention isn’t patentable.
In the early 1970s, an inventor attempted to patent a process for applying zinc coatings to iron surfaces in a vacuum. The inventor claimed that the novel aspect of his process was using a wire brush to roughen the iron surface before the application of the zinc coating in order to improve adhesion. While the patent application couched this process in complex language, the Patent Office found that the process was based upon a known property—if you’ve ever painted wood, you know that you need to roughen the surface first with a piece of sandpaper—and thus unpatentable, even though the process was fairly technical and might have obscured that obviousness.
In short, if you can expect the benefit of doing something, then the means of obtaining that benefit is not patentable. In our next blog post, we’ll discuss what it means to demonstrate non-obvious improvements by showing unexpected results.