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The person having ordinary skill in the art (often abbreviated ''PHOSITA'' in the United States), the person of ordinary skill in the art, the skilled addressee, person skilled in the art or simply the skilled person is a legal fiction found in many patent laws throughout the world. This fictional person is considered to have the normal skills and knowledge in a particular technical field, without being a genius. He or she mainly serves as a reference for determining, or at least evaluating, whether an invention is non-obvious or not (in U.S. patent law), or involves an inventive step or not (in European patent laws). If it would have been obvious for this fictional person to come up with the invention while starting from the prior art, then the particular invention is considered not patentable. In some patent laws, the person skilled in the art is also used as a reference in the context of other criteria, for instance in order to determine whether an invention is sufficiently disclosed in the description of the patent or patent application (sufficiency of disclosure is a fundamental requirement in most patent laws), or in order to determine whether two technical means are equivalents when evaluating infringement (see also doctrine of equivalents). In practice, this legal fiction is a set of legal fictions which evolved over time and which may be differently construed for different purposes. This legal fiction basically translates the need for each invention to be considered in the context of the technical field it belongs to. == Canada == The ''Patent Act (R.S.C., 1985, c. P-4)''〔''Patent Act'', RSC 1985, c P-4.〕 makes explicit reference to a person skilled in the art (PSITA) in the s.28.3 requirement that the subject-matter of a patent be non-obvious. The ''person skilled in the art'' is described in ''Beloit Canada Ltd. v. Valmet Oy'': “the technician skilled in the art but having no scintilla of inventiveness or imagination; a paragon of deduction and dexterity, wholly devoid of intuition; a triumph of the left hemisphere over the right. The question to be asked is whether this mythical creature (the man in the Clapham omnibus of patent law) would, in the light of the state of the art and of common general knowledge as at the claimed date of invention, have come directly and without difficulty to the solution taught by the patent.”〔''Beloit Canada Ltd. v. Valmet Oy'' (1986), 8 C.P.R. (3d) 289 at p. 294.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア(Wikipedia)』 ■ウィキペディアで「person having ordinary skill in the art」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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