Flash of genius - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

The Flash of Genius Doctrine or Flash of Genius Test was a test for patentability

Patentability

Within the context of a national or multilateral body of law, an invention is patentable if it meets the relevant legal conditions to be granted a patent...

used by the United States Federal Courts

United States federal courts

The United States federal courts make up the judiciary branch of federal government of the United States organized under the United States Constitution and laws of the federal government.-Categories:...

for over a decade, circa 1941. The doctrine was formalized in Cuno Engineering v. Automatic Devices., which held that the inventive act had to come into the mind of an inventor in a "flash of genius" and not as a result of tinkering. "The new device, however useful it may be, must reveal the flash of creative genius, not merely the skill of the calling. If it fails, it has not established its right to a private grant on the public domain

Public domain

Works are in the public domain if the intellectual property rights have expired, if the intellectual property rights are forfeited, or if they are not covered by intellectual property rights at all...

." This test, which lasted little more than a decade, was most likely an appealing and easy standard for judges and unsophisticated jurors to apply to any given patent dispute when the technology being disputed was beyond their scientific acumen.

The flash of genius test was eventually rejected by the 1952 patent statute's Section 103 standard of non-obviousness

Inventive step and non-obviousness

The inventive step and non-obviousness reflect a same general patentability requirement present in most patent laws, according to which an invention should be sufficiently inventive — i.e., non-obvious — in order to be patented....

: "Patentability shall not be negatived by the manner in which the invention was made." Many decades later, the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit

-Vacancies and pending nominations:-List of former judges:-Chief judges:Notwithstanding the foregoing, when the court was initially created, Congress had to resolve which chief judge of the predecessor courts would become the first chief judge...

stated that this portion of Section 103 was enacted expressly to overrule the flash of genius test from Cuno.

See also