A Day in the Life of a Patent Examiner

ahdkd writes "Forbes has an older article which describes the world of patent examining: Search 500,000 Documents, Review 160,000 Pages In 20 Hours, And Then Do It All Over Again. Might help people understand the USPTO and patents in general a little better."

Comments

yeah right...

[Anonymous Coward]

You know whats a lot easier than reading all that stuff? Simply approving the application.. then a nice nap.

Evidence that the system is a failure

[dada21]

I believe this article is yet another nail in the coffin of the patent system. It is time to rethink the patent system. Economist Fritz Machlup has proven that patents do not entice corporations to develop new products; in fact, the "short-term advantage a company derives from developing a new product and being the first to put it on the market may be incentive enough."

Patents offer a authoritarian power to destroy competition, increase prices, and skew the relationship between research and creation by scaring off new ideas developed on old ones.

Re:Evidence that the system is a failure

[Anonymous Coward]

3300 patent examininers to deal with 2M incoming requests a year? I'd wager the IRS has a higher investigation to filer ratio and the IRS less than 100 years old.

I guess we know where our priorities are.

Do It Right

[SpamJunkie]

My feelings on this are simple: do it right or don't do it at all.

If the government can't create a system that approves patents corrently then there should be no approval process at all, and thus, no patents at all. It would be better to let the market protect innovators, however weak the protection, than to let a flawed patent office allow innovators to be harmed by those that would exploit the flaws.

If they are overworked

[SirGeek]

They should ban together and refuse. That is what they need to do to protect the system. Yes, I understand that it is difficult but if they don't bitch all the way up the line, then who will ?

I mean, Ok. They get fired for saying that they can't do their jobs. They would be able to go to almost ANY news outlet and get their story printed . Patent Office fires worker for complaining about unfair practices . That would not look good for the USPTO.

I also find the article "lacking" in explaining HOW they search let alone WHERE they search.

If the internet isn't used , Why don't they mention it - We don't bother to check google if the idea exists already. We only look if it is already patented, not if it already exists in the public domain.

Re:If they are overworked

[Xzzy]

> They should ban together and refuse. That is what they need to do to protect the system. Yes, I
> understand that it is difficult but if they don't bitch all the way up the line, then who will ?

You have no idea how government entities function, do you? :)

10% of the people (maybe even less) working at a site will actually be good workers who give a fig about their job and how well things are run. The issue is that this segment is never in a position to institute change. These people don't stick around long, they become cynical quite fast and generally quit and return to jobs in the private sector (which often have just as fucked up management systems, but in completely different ways).

Another 10% of the people are the ones who can make decisions, but have absolutely no background to make effective decisions (they got where they are mostly via seniority). They instead opt to spend their days in endless meetings hoping someone else makes a decision so they can go back to "fine tuning" the organization chart.

The remaining 80% is dead wood. Completely lazy, useless fatasses who know it's damn near impossible to fire a government employee and only show up to ensure they keep getting a paycheck. Their sole desire is to avoid rocking the boat, in effort to avoid losing their gravy train. Most of them have held government jobs for so long no one even notices how bloody useless they are, except for the original 10% who are powerless to do anything about it.

Point being, a majority of the people working for the USPTO plain out doesn't give a shit. They will NEVER "strike" or "take it to the press", soley because it means they would actually have to scrape their butts out of their chair and rub some of their brain cells together.

Shades of 'Yes Minister'

[Space cowboy]

There was a British TV comedy about the manipulation of government by the civil service (and vice versa, sometimes :-) called 'Yes Minister', and 'Yes Prime Minister'. One of the favourite tactics of "Sir Humphrey" (civil service mandarin) is to deluge the minister with reams of information, to make it completely impossible to make a decision by a given deadline.

It strikes me that when a patent is 160,000 pages long, someone is trying the same tactic. Perhaps there ought to be a limit on the size of patent applications. After all, if it is sufficiently revolutionary to be awarded protection from its possible competition, it ought to be easily stated and understood. Let anything else just compete.

I suspect some would lose out, but I also think the patent system overall would win. The original patent applications were on a single sheet of paper....

Simon.

The essence of how patents are used

[ZorroXXX]

From the article: ... says Nolan. "They want to see how far they can go, and almost anything I give them is going to limit what somebody else can do."

This is exactly what is wrong with the (current) patent system. It is supposed to promote innovation but instead it is used as a tool to put sticks in the wheels of the competitors.

But patents aren't only for corporations...

[fullmetal55]

also for individuals who don't have the resources to produce the products but have the ingenuity and drive to create the new products. and as such the patent system allows them to still reap the rewards of their hard work. I don't think corporations need patents either, but the patent system or something like it still needs to protect the little guy. disbanding the patent system punishes the little guy while rewarding the big corporations.

Re:But patents aren't only for corporations...

[dada21]

I wish I could agree with you in accepting that patents help the individual, but in my experience, the process of getting a patent does not seem to make the benefit worth it.

An individual with an idea can't go very far unless they have entrepreneurship as well. If they don't have the drive to promote an idea, what good is the idea? A patent may offer them something to sell to a bigger corporation, much more can be done just by getting together with people who want to promote the idea for their own mutual gain.

If I invented a new idea, and I couldn't distribute it, I would still have the ability to find someone else who can. Entering into a binding contract, we could create a partnership (or corporation). Until that contract is issued, I wouldn't have to explain the idea or the secrets of the idea. A non-disclosure agreement and a binding contract are really all you need to protect the idea (as is obvious from one of the links I posted in my original message).

Re:But patents aren't only for corporations...

[HeghmoH]

Until that contract is issued, I wouldn't have to explain the idea or the secrets of the idea. A non-disclosure agreement and a binding contract are really all you need to protect the idea (as is obvious from one of the links I posted in my original message).

This is precisely what happened before patents, and exactly why the entire patent system was invented in the first place. People would get good ideas, and try to sell them. But they can't disclose the idea, because then they don't get rewarded. They also can't find a buyer, because they can't explain the idea well enough to prospective buyers without giving the idea away. Thus, the good idea dies with the person who came up with it.

Lots and lots of inventions were lost in exactly this way. Many people would rather die with their invention a secret than have somebody else make a fortune out of it. The key component to a patent is that it is required to publish a full specification of the invention, enough so that a knowledgeable person could build it, in return for the patent. This way, even if the inventor has a heart attack or is hit by a bus or every city where his multinational conglomerate has offices is hit by gigantic rocks from outer space, the invention is not lost.

The simple fact of the matter is that, like copyrights, patents are fundamentally good ideas; it's the implementations that are broken. Both were originally conceived not as a way to let people make money, but as an aid to society, to promote invention and creativity. The problem now is that it's gone too far towards giving people money. Scale back the terms of copyrights and patents, examine them more thoroughly, make people pay (more) for them, etc., and you can fix the system. It's not necessary to destroy it.

They don't like it?

[Rogerborg]

Then they can resign. $45K starting salary rising to $90K for a 4 day week? Fuck them. Let's subcontract the whole lot to India.

If doing a good job's impossible, why bother?

[Junior J. Junior III]

So, if you know you can't possibly do a good job in evaluating that volume of patents, why not slow things down to a crawl, and do stuff the right way? Sure, we'd still be looking at the merits of the application for the patent for the transistor, but isn't that better than no-look rubber stamping of bullshit like one-click shopping?

Hype job?

[Quixote]

I smell a hype-job.

Here's a quote:
When a patent is first filed, the key hurdles are novelty and obviousness; i.e., does this idea really represent something new, and is it informed by a particular creativity? Eighty percent of patent applications are rejected for failing to meet those first hurdles.

Someone please tell the writer about some of the "novel" patents issued by the USPTO.

Re:Well, it can't work this way.

[SquarePants]

The USPTO IS in the black. Has been for years. It is one of the few agencies that makes money for the gov't. The problem is that the funds incoming to the USPTO from the public go into the general government fund, not in the USPTO's fund. Then, every year, the USPTO has to grovel to congress for money. It usually gets less than it asks for and ALWAYS gets less than it generates (its called diversion and many think it amounts to an unconbstitutional tax on inventors).

Also, the USPTO actually looses money on the examination fees it charges. Although it can cost upwards of $20K in attorneys' fees to prepare and file an application, the governement filing fees are usually less than $1,000. The USPTO makes about 2/3 of its monry from the maintenance fees that existing patent holders have to pay to maintain their patents in force.