Today's blog post will allow me the chance to discuss my personal view on the nine patents discussed with regards to anticipation and obviousness. In order for ideas and inventions to become patents, we discussed in lecture that they should be non-obvious, but let's delve deeper into my opinions on the sleeve patents.
When discussing obviousness, it is important to recognize that this means an invention must maintain a level of significance and must be different to prior inventions. Therefore, simply tweaking older inventions does not justify a patent in my opinion unless the invention is novel in some respect. When discussing anticipation, it is important to recognize that the invention must be unique and different, such that it has never been anticipated.
Through my last blog post I gave descriptions of the nine sleeve patents and discussed what made them all unique and different from each other with respect to background, priority date, technology, ideas, specifications, diagrams and the claims themselves. However, through my analysis, it has become clear that only a few of these patents respected elements of non-obviousness and anticipation that we discussed in lecture. In fact, the only inventions that actually were unique, not obvious, and unanticipated were the first cup sleeve, the first thermal cup, and the temperature-indicating sleeves. these inventions incorporated new elements, while the others seemed somewhat redundant and tended to overlap with respect to their descriptions. Furthermore, the other six patents made minor tweaks to materials, small changes to design (i.e. position/design of air gaps).
Despite my opinions, all nine inventions were considered non-obvious and non-anticipated enough to become patented. Therefore, in my opinion, the process to develop and file a patent seems somewhat easy, because so many similar inventions were patented with very few differences.
Looking forward to reading what you all think about my opinions on these nine sleeve patents!
I really like how concise your post was while still getting your point across. I agree very much with your opinion regarding the minor tweaks that differentiated these patents.
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