iabervon's Journal: Patents

I wish people on slashdot wouldn't talk about patents without a basic understanding of how to read a patent. The abstract is an abstract, and is always going to be extremely broad. That's not what the claim is on. Ditto the title. If you can describe your invention in a few words, it's almost certainly obvious.

The patent applies to things under the claims. The claims (and supporting documents) are the important parts. The rest are not really anything more than search keywords.