navigating the patent maze

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to hear KSR v Teleflex, which will address the appropriate standard to apply in order to find an invention obvious.  According to the current standard, multiple prior art references,each of which disclose an element of the claimed invention, can be combined to show the whole invention - but only if the references contain some "motivation, suggestion, or teaching" to do so.  Many critics of the patent system often consider this standard to be too lax, leading to patents protecting "trivial inventions", in their view.  On the other hand, most inventions are new combinations of old elements, and in the extreme, a strict standard would lead to very few patents being granted at all.  Hopefully, the Supreme Court will come down somewhere in between these two highly divergent viewpoints. 

For more information, see Patently-O.