Abstract :
The U.S. Supreme Court made it harder to patent things by raising a standard known as "obviousness." A lot of people had figured that this bar had fallen so low you could practically step over it. Now some people are talking as if there\´s no longer any point in getting a patent- but that\´s going too far. Still, some existing patents probably will fall by the wayside. To answer the question, one has to take a good, hard look at the case that induced the court to redefine the word "obvious." This ruling contradicted that of the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, the usual last chance in patent matters, given that the Supreme Court hears only one or two patent cases a year.
