🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <f6fu02eV0cvE01@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com> tjc50@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com (Terry Carroll) writes:
>Maybe not.  Depends what that phrase "involve an inventive step" means.
>Setting aside for the moment that it's tautologous (i.e., patents are
>available for inventions which involve an inventive step, but not for
>inventions that do not involve an inventive step; that is, only inventive
>inventions are patentable!)

My reaction is that the key word is not "inventive" - as you say, it is
a redundancy to require that inventions be inventive - but "step".
We would naturally assume that an invention be patentable, but this
wording seems (to me) to also allow the patenting of an entire product or
process, only part of which (an arbitrarily small part?) is new.
How would that compare to existing patent law?

At the same time, it also requires that there be some identifiable "step"
that is, in itself, inventive, and so rules out patenting something
that is simply a "new" agglomeration of old ideas.  In this sense, it may
be comparable to the non-obviousness requirement of current patent law.
-- 
		    Brian Thomson,	    CSRI Univ. of Toronto
		    utcsri!uthub!thomson, thomson@hub.toronto.edu