I. INTRODUCTION Patent law has been missing the obvious. Tasked with advancing innovation by awarding an exclusive right to make or use certain inventions in exchange for their creation and disclosure to the public, (1) patent law has installed certain threshold conditions as gatekeepers to ensure that the valuable patent right is granted only to worthy inventions. When it began to appear that the traditional gatekeepers of novelty (2) and utility (3) were insufficient to prevent patents from being awarded to trifling inventions, a new condition of patentability was enacted, that of the invention's nonobviousness. (4) Scholars have described nonobviousness as the "ultimate condition of patentability" (5) because it requires that an invention represent a significant technological or scientific breakthrough compared to what is already known or doable. However, until now, and despite considerable recent attention to nonobviousness by the Supreme Court and scholars, a vital component of every obviousness inquiry has neither been satisfactorily addressed nor resolved: the object of the inquiry.
