Inventors are SHOCKED at this ONE LITTLE TRICK that Patent Examiners use!

You’ve put time, money, and energy into your invention. You filed a patent application. The examiner responded and rejected it. Not because someone already invented the exact same thing, but because the examiner wrote something like: “Claims 1–10 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Smith in view of Johnson and further in view of Lee, as modified by Nguyen.”

If that sounds like a confusing word salad, you’re not alone—and yet that single sentence may be the reason your invention is being called obvious and unpatentable.

This surprises a lot of inventors. They assume that if no one has done exactly what they’ve done, then it must be patentable. But U.S. patent law has a separate requirement beyond novelty. Patents are only granted for non-obvious improvements over what came before. And that’s where many applications run into trouble.

What Does it Mean to be Non-Obvious?

To decide whether an invention is obvious, the patent office asks what a hypothetical person of ordinary skill in the art would have thought at the time of the invention. If that person, given access to all of the “prior art,” would have viewed the invention as a predictable combination or a small tweak of existing ideas, the claims may be rejected. This is true even if no one had actually put those ideas together before.

But what is Prior Art?

Prior art includes anything publicly available before your patent’s priority date (usually the earliest filing date in your patent family), such as:

• Patents and published patent applications with publication dates before your priority date.
• Printed publications (like articles, brochures, websites) available before your priority date.
• Public use of the invention in the U.S. before your priority date.
• Sales or offers for sale of the invention in the U.S. before your priority date.
• Your own patents, printed publications, public use, and sales or offers for sale made more than one year before your priority date.

Any of these can be used, whether individually or in combination, to argue that your invention was an obvious extension of existing knowledge.

The ONE TRICK Examiners Use: Combining References

Examiners are trained to look for ways to combine prior art. If Reference A shows one part of your invention and Reference B shows another, the examiner may argue that a person of ordinary skill in the art could have combined them to arrive at your claimed invention.

The legal test is not whether anyone actually made the combination, but whether it would have been “obvious” to do so based on the knowledge available to a hypothetical person of ordinary skill who had access to all the prior art.

To support a rejection, the examiner will often rely on familiar reasoning. They might argue that the combination would have improved performance, achieved predictable results, or substituted one known element for another. These justifications are enough to form the basis for a rejection based on obviousness.

Why This Catches Inventors Off Guard

Inventors usually think in terms of real-world use. If no one has built or sold the invention, it feels new. But the law looks at whether a reasonable expert could have combined existing ideas to come up with it. Moreover, the law can find something obvious even if nobody actually combined things in that way before!

In many cases, even your own prior work can count against you if it was publicly disclosed more than a year before your filing date. Public use of a prototype, a detailed conference presentation, or an old investor pitch deck can become a liability if not managed properly.

This gap between what inventors experience and how the law operates is often where applications fail.

How a Patent Attorney Helps You Navigate This

First, from the beginning, a patent attorney can conduct a targeted prior art search and help you present claims that go beyond what a reasonable expert would view as an obvious extension.

However, even the best prior art searches aren’t perfect and don’t always find everything. If the Examiner finds different prior art and rejects your claims, a patent attorney can respond with legal arguments showing why the cited combination is flawed, lacks motivation, or fails to achieve the claimed results. The attorney can also help amend the claims to steer around the prior art.

But these strategies only work if the original patent application describes the invention in sufficient detail. You cannot claim features that were never included in the specification. That is why a thorough, well-written disclosure at the start is essential. It gives you the flexibility to adapt the claims in response to rejections that come up during prosecution.

Conclusion

The ONE TRICK that patent examiners use, combining pieces of prior art to argue that your invention was an obvious improvement, can be a powerful barrier to getting a patent. What many inventors don’t realize is that prior art includes not just issued patents and published papers, but also public use and your own disclosures if they happened more than a year before filing.

Understanding the full scope of prior art, including how your own history may affect patentability, is key to building a patent that will hold up. A detailed application, backed by a well-informed strategy, gives you the best chance to secure and enforce meaningful protection.

If you’re preparing to file or facing a rejection, we can help you get ahead of these issues before they derail your application. Knowing how the system works (and what counts as prior art) can make all the difference.