Community Standards of Patent Offensiveness: Public Opinion Data and Obscenity Law

Abstract Public opinion data are used to empirically derivegeneral "community standards of patent offensiveness" for differenttypes of communities. These data indicate that such standardsbecome more restrictive in the less urbanized, less populatedareas of the country. The relevance of these data to policy-formationis also considered.Marc B. Glassman is an independent ResearchConsultant and Book Review Editor of the Public Opinion Quarterly.The author wishes to thank W. Phillips Davison for his commentson an earlier draft of this article.