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US Patent Office To Hire 500 New Examiners
ddillman writes to us with a story from EEtimes that is reporting that the US Government, specifically the PTO, is hiring up to 500 electrical engineers to help assess the validity of new patent claims on technical gadgets. Good - and with the downturn in the high tech industry you can get them cheap.
call me a cynic if you will, but hiring more people to do a job doesn't necessarily mean they'll do it well. Sure, they're engineers with experience and we all might assume that they'll have a bit more insight into what should and shouldn't be legitimate claims. However, they're still going to be under someone who's giving out the directions on how things are supposed to be done, and that someone is probably well entrenched in the thinking that's become the object of many a laugh on these message boards. Strange how independent thought tends to wither and dry up after enough time has passed in almost any job. Here's hoping..
Hopefully the people they're hiring have many years of experience in analyzing patents and inventions. Hopefully they're all intelligent, unbiased and unassuming. We all know this isn't going to be so..We can only hope someone doesn't do something like give (insert large software/hardware company here) a patent on some key patent that will allow them to sue everyone that owns a computer and uses the internet. Hey, it could happen, but we must hope that they're hiring the best...or it just might.
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
Isn't this the basic problem with the USPTO these days? If they are simple ideas do they really deserve a patent?
I think this is definitely a good thing, but an electrical engineer is not qualified to examine a software patent; EEs and CEs deal mostly with hardware and software written in extremely low-level languages (such as assembly or raw machine code). It seems to me that the USPO desperately needs programmers (CS people) to look at the flood of incoming software patents to prevent cascades of lawsuits like the ones following the dot-com bust; e.g., where a company patents an already well-known or incredibly vague algorithm, and then files suit against everybody from Bob Dobbs to the Care Bears for patent violation.
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I Hit the Karma Cap, and All I Got Was This Lousy
And sometimes, what's good for government is good for us all. This economic dry patch might be good for the industry in the long term, starting with a beefed-up US patent office.
dlek
If you read the article, you'll see this only applies to telecommunications and electronic devices. No mention made about software or Internet technology. So no worries, folks, I'm sure we'll still have plenty of silly "one-click" patents to talk about here on /.
Electronic Frontier Foundation for online civil rights information
the job is not at all difficult. but don't think you can change the system somehow, i spend most of my time trying to untangle myself from the beaurocracy that is the patent office.
pays well tho.
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Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
Here are questions that jump in to my mind on reading this:
Is there a problem with patenting of electronic circuit designs that's similar to the familiar problems of patenting algorithms, processes, and genetic materials?
Namely, are there too many patents for devices that don't have proven, unique, new, and specific utility, and that don't necessarily require inventive insight?
Are we giving "same as the last design, just add this component" electrical device patents?
Is this how IBM, Motorola, and Intel compile such impressive numbers of patents granted?
It certainly seems like this could be the case. Seriously, I'm curious about info/opinions on this.
"You can't get something for nothing." - my grandfather, on the stock market and Reaganomics.
They get their money from the application process. So the incentive is get through as many patents as possible. There is a quota system that supports this policy.
The patent's office funding doesn't come from granting as many patents as possible, but other orginizations who are more politically backed funding comes from the patent office granting more patents. The sad part of it is that even if the patent office gets more income from the patenting process they can't hire more people or make other decisions based on that process because Congress takes away all of their surplus if they are over the budgetted amount. It's an aweful cycle that no one seems to be able to break.
I think Engineers generally have a broader base of understanding of the impacts of technology and a generally more holistic view on the science/tech map. In a patent examiner, you'd hope they would be considering patents in the broader scope of technology.
My father is a physisist with a PHD and works as the prinicipal research scientist of a mass spectrometry company; while he holds several patents, I highly doubt he has the wide picture needed for assessing the validity of patents.
Also, engineers, and I'm just guessing here, are more used to dealing with reports in the vain of patent applications; with schematics, circuit diagrams, etc. I dunno, I think it just has to do with the broader knowledge base engineers are required to possesses, in light of the fact that they are the last layer of higher education before a product hits the market. R&D tell you what can be done; engineers do it.
Lets also not forget that they are doing this to deal with the new influx of technology related patents, as the western world increasingly becomes patent happy. In this respect, I'd bet that much of this influx relates to inventions stemming directly from the comp/ee world.
"Old man yells at systemd"
500 more examiners just means we will see more patents coming out of the mill, not better ones.
The problem we face is not that we do not have enough examiner staff to properly consider submissions. Rather, the fundamental problem is that we give monopoly rights to software at all.
Money drowns out common sense any day.
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Give me LIBERTY, or give me a check.
If they're hiring more because "Oh no, we're catching a ton of flak over these recent patents, we need to make sure bad patents don't get through", then that's great. That's good.
But if it's, "Dangit, we don't have enough people to rubberstamp corporate patents FAST enough! GWB needs us to Do Our Part for the economy by letting every patent through, find more rubberstamps!", then it'll only make things worse.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
You moron. EE's are not now and never have been cheap. The dot-com bust and downturn of computer sales have not left them wandering the streets with hopes of getting any job they can find. That's what happened to the hordes of IS geeks who thought they could make good money fast without actually learning a useful skill. EE's spend gruelling years in college earning their degrees because they know that once they get out, they are entering a market where they are constantly in demand. It's great that the USPTO is hiring some EE's, but that doesn't mean they're going to get them at minimum wage.
Today's Sesame Street was brought to you by the number e.
Sorry, the OP is still right.
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... the patent office would indeed make less money.
If the USPTO (and, in the same way, the EPO) was stricter on patent applications, and rejected all the bogus shit we see derided here on slashdot,
... the con artists would stop submitting those bogus patents.
And