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Patent examiners are not the USPTO. They are employees of the USPTO, and the USPTO is -- contrary to drinkypoo's assertion -- not "funded by charging fees for granting patents". There are extensive fees for applying for a patent, but no fees are due upon grant of a patent.

To me, the word "granting" means "patenting process" regardless an application is granted. The overall cost to apply and get a patent is not cheap. And yes, USPTO is funded by itself from their own revenue. They have their own budget which comes from their own revenue (fee collections).

In an analogy to the automatic dismissal of cold fusion experimentation that Price notes, for more than a century, the US Patent Office automatically rejected patent applications directed to restoring baldness, because it was "inherently unbelievable" and "involved implausible scientific principles".

Can you give any more details on that? Googling didn't turn up anything by way of confirmation.

Sure. In re Cortright is a Federal Circuit case that discusses it, and cites to earlier cases:

The PTO may establish a reason to doubt an invention’s asserted utility when the written description “suggest[s] an inherently unbelievable undertaking or involve[s] implausible scientific principles.” Brana, 51 F.3d at 1566, 34 USPQ2d at 1441; see also In re Eltgroth, 419 F.2d 918, 164 USPQ 221 (CCPA 1970) (control of aging process). Treating baldness was once considered an inherently unbelievable undertaking. See In re Ferens, 417 F.2d 1072, 1074, 163 USPQ 609, 611 (CCPA 1969); In re Oberwener, 115 F.2d 826, 829, 47 USPQ 455, 458 (CCPA 1940).

And Oberweger (the above cite is a typo) includes the quotes:

It was the view of the tribunals below that the affidavits were weak in character and were not sufficient to show utility for a concoction which belongs to a class of compositions which from common knowledge has long been the subject matter of much humbuggery and fraud...

Very much like the situation at bar, the affidavits in that case did not afford convincing proof of utility. Certainly there is nothing in this record to show that appellant's composition is any better than the many hundreds of similar concoctions that have been advertised and sold to a credulous public since the beginning of recorded history. It is a matter of common knowledge that numerous preparations, similar in many respects to the one at bar, have been advertised and sold for the purpose of producing hair on bald heads and which were totally lacking in utility, often harmful to the human body, and whose sale was generally understood to be a fraud upon the public.

Having in mind the particular subject matter involved in the instant alleged invention, we are in full agreement with the tribunals of the Patent Office that the claims which are before us on their merits were properly rejected for lack of patentable utility and that the board committed no error in affirming the action of the examiner requiring division of the claims as aforesaid.

35 USC 101 is the relevant statute and it gets a lot of discussion lately with regard to whether software is/should be patentable, and whether isolated genes are/should be patentable, but it's also had a long and interesting history. In addition to baldness cures and perpetual motion machines, slot machines used to be rejected under 35 USC 101 as unpatentable because gambling "lacked any moral utility". That got turned around only very recently in the 1990s, in the amusingly titled Juicy Whip v. Orange Bang, which dealt with the "utility" of machines intended to defraud customers. Very weird, interesting, and mostly irrelevant region of law.

Disclaimer: I am a patent attorney, which also makes me very weird, interesting, and mostly irrelevant.

IBM has more patents than any company in the world. Indeed, they patented just about everything they thought up. And now they receive an untold amount of licensing fees from just about every other major computing company, and life goes on. Take a look at the following report below, listing all of the major patent holders. #2 is Samsung, #3 Canon, #4 Sony, #5 LG. http://www.ipo.org/wp-content/...

They don't seem to be doing much of that anymore.

They're sure generating patents though.....last year IBM was ranked highest in the number of U.S. patents issued with 5,866.
http://www.ipo.org/AM/Template.cfm?Section=Top_300_Patent_Owners&ContentID=29856&template=/CM/ContentDisplay.cfm

Are you serious???? Have you not heard of the Patent Reform Act of 2005, H.R. 2795 ?

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d109:h.r.0 2795: ( the bill)

http://www.ipo.org/template.cfm?Section=Patent_Ref orm1&Template=/TaggedPage/TaggedPageDisplay.cfm&TP LID=196&ContentID=18391&requestTimeout=500 (everything you could ever possibly want to know)

This is making major MAJOR changes to patent law (prior use rights, first to file instead of first to invent, creation of public opposition proceedings, publication of all patents, etc, etc, etc.) in 10 or 12 MAJOR areas of patent law.

And this thing is going to pass. It has wide congressional bipartisan support and the support of the all the major players. And it is a good thing for consumers.

Yikes, get your facts straight.

What a judge has seen is that this particular patent was unenforceable under the patent system.

What is ridiculous, is that it is often more cost effective to pay licensing fees for these kinds of patents, than to defeat them in the court system.

Completely agreed with both points. But it's not for the first time: patent judges often find bad patents invalid, and it's not even the first time that undue delay has been cited as a reason for unenforceability. On the other hand, the cost of getting the court system to reach the point of making a useful decision is out of the reach of many, there is a big unsolved problem of access to justice.

The District court opinion in the Lemelson case is online here. (Beware of size, it's a 33-page image-scan pdf.) The defendants won on three independent bases -- the asserted patent claims were "unenforceable under the doctrine of prosecution laches" [undue delay, amounting to decades], the asserted claims were not infringed because use of the accused products did not satisfy one or more of the limitations of each asserted patent claim, and the claims were invalid for lack of written description and enablement. Personally I hope it's got enough supporting fact-finding in it to survive an appeal.

-wb-

Interestingly, guess who is a major investor in Altiris? Check this out.

Maybe Kimball will be a bit more carefull this time round as he has already had part of one decision against a Canopy company overturned on appeal. He does seem clued up though.

See here for details on the Altiris case.

Peace and Karma...

By reading the Federal Circuit opinion that reversed the district court's summary judgment, it seems that the key issue that prevents Jot from infringing is that it "does not allow for 'definitive recognition' of symbols immediately upon pen lift by the user." Certain letters and symbols in Jot -- 'T,' 'X,' the question mark, and so on -- require multiple strokes to create the character. The actual shapes of the characters are not part of the patent, so there's no problem with Jot and Xerox's Unistroke sharing swooshes.

This leads one to wonder why the Graffiti 'X' doesn't allow Graffiti to escape infringement -- the appellate court opinion quotes the district court as citing accented characters in this sense, but not Graffiti's two-stroke 'X.' If I had to make a wild guess, I'd assume this was proffered by Palm in district court and refuted by Xerox on the grounds that the first slash in the 'X' is actually the stroke to enter extended mode, and thus the 'X' is still technically a unistroke character. If Palm had simply reversed the direction of the strokes so that the first stroke wasn't extended mode, then they might have been immunized. Of such tiny errors are great patent cases decided.

This guy is now well know for going to conferences, learning about new technology, then doing some rush 'research' and filing tons of patents with his 'partner,' Sharp. Then, they go out and try to get 'licensing fees' from other companies.

Take a look at United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit or Semiconductor Energy Laboratory LABORATORY CO., LTD. v. SAMSUNG ELECTRONICS CO., LTD.,

This guy is a leach that does no real research. I just can't respect him.

It looks like Peter Olson is a patent attorney for 3M (Which is based in St. Paul - the address in the patent) Look at these couple of documents that talk about a "Peter L Olson" First document and second document

From the last paragraph of the patent it states "the present invention may be referred to by the present inventor and his sister as "Tarzan" swinging."

I'm going to guess that Peter Olson is dad and he gave his son, Steven, a gift of his very own patent. A pretty cool hack of the patent system if you ask me. Also goes to show how screwed up the system is.

A little poking at Mapquest and you can get a good aerial view the tree that inspired the patent as well.

In fact, this idea seems to be borne out by the following web research. I found this conference webpage. (Do a page search for "Peter L. Olson") It seems our boy works for 3M in St Paul, MN and is indeed invloved in patent law. I can't be positive it's the same dude, but it seems likely.

"Our competitor has dubious patent A. We know it won't stand up in court and we'd like to do A. Now we can either 1) go ahead and do A, and fight the inevitable lawsuit--even though we'll win, this will cost us half a million dollars, minimum; or 2) we can get dubious patent B--then when they sue us for A, we sue them for B, and we settle out-of-court with a cross-licensing agreement."

This is why I don't blame Amazon for the one-click patent and won't boycott them (well, at least not for that)--that's just a symptom, and treating the symptom does not cure the disease. The root cause is that these patents are being granted in the first place.

Patent examiners are overworked (given an entirely unreasonable quota of patents they have to examine in a given time) and underpaid (making significantly less than their counterparts in industry). Of course, it doesn't help that the House of Representatives has voted to take away $295M in patent fees from the USPTO in FY2001. The patent office should be quasi-privatized, like the post office, and allowed to keep whatever revenue it collects, and not have its budget gutted by congress for other programs.