Innovation Cafe with Gary Shuster, patent litigator and prolific inventor.
Transcript
Let’s talk about the difference between novelty and obviousness in patent law. Something has to not be obvious, which means if you combine a couple of things people have already done, it would not be obvious from there to make your invention. But novelty is much harder. Imagine, for example, I came up with a brand new use for aspirin, a drug that’s been around for so long that it was never even patented because the patent system didn’t exist when it was created. But imagine I figure out if I take aspirin and put it in a petri dish with a certain kind of bacteria.
The bacteria grow 20 times faster or they don’t grow at all. Those are both amazing findings. They’re not obvious at all. But they’re also not novel because aspirin already exists. So that’s the difference between obviousness and novelty. There will not be a quiz on it unless you try to get a patent, in which case you’ll be quizzed on it multiple times. Catch you next time.