skilled person in and provides for that "an invention shall be considered as involving an inventive step if, having regard to the state of the art, it is not obvious to a person skilled in the art". The EPC also refers to the skilled person in , which requires that "[t]he European patent application must disclose the invention in a manner sufficiently clear and complete for it to be carried out by a person skilled in the art". Still further, the Protocol on the Interpretation of refers to the skilled person. Article 1, 2nd sentence, states that "[n]or should it [Article 69 EPC] be taken to mean that the claims serve only as a guideline and that the actual protection conferred may extend to what, from a consideration of the description and the drawings by a "person skilled in the art", the patent proprietor has contemplated". The European Patent Office provides guidelines that set forth some of the skilled person's capabilities. A related concept is the "business person", who is also a notional person. It is used at the EPO when assessing inventive step of an invention involving both technical and non-technical elements. The business person "represents an abstraction or shorthand for a separation of business considerations from technical". United States A person having ordinary skill in the art is a legal fiction first codified in the Patent Act of 1952. The PHOSITA is a test of "obviousness" which is one of the largest gray areas in patent law. The PHOSITA appears again in slightly different words in the provision requiring a proper disclosure: Comparison Quite similar to the logic of "reasonable person" used in the common law of torts as a test of negligence, the PHOSITA is a hypothetical individual, neither a genius nor a layperson, created in the mind of a patent examiner or the jury to see if a claimed invention is too obvious to be patented. Creation During the examination of a patent application, the examiner tries to find out if that invention has already been invented by another person. If so, the patent application will be returned to the applicant to be narrowed or modified. If not, the examiner will bring out the PHOSITA test to check if that invention is so obvious that people in the trade will invent it with or without patent applicant's efforts. In the end, if the examiner can not