Slashdot Mirror
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."
Rich and powerful interests don't want good patent examinations. They want the control that comes from having spurious patent approvals, which must be contested in expensive court proceedings. Those interests make sure that the U.S. patent and trademark office is under-funded. Twenty years ago there was better funding.
This is just one more example of the rapidly widening corruption in the U.S. government. Another example: Vice-president Dick Cheney, when he worked in the defense department, had the rules changed about procuring services during times of war. Then, as Vice-president, he pushed for a war with Iraq, and made sure the services went to his former company, Halliburton.
As David Letterman said, when you write a check for your part of the $87 billion that will be used to "rebuild" Iraq (after bombing it), remember that there are two Ls in Halliburton.
There are certainly exceptions to this rule. For example, the pharmaceutical industry, because of its huge upfront costs, often will not develop a perfectly useful drug unless it can patent it. The reason is that without patent protection, other companies will free-ride on the FDA approval process and other startup costs.
Products which are high in intellectual content or up-front cost/risk and low in reproduction cost often need protection or they will not be developed.
There is no doubt in my mind that the patent system, applied to software, is extremely wrong and has the potential to destroy the industry or put it into the hands of gigantic corporations who can use cross-licensing to avoid patent problems.
But not every industry is software.
As to an economist "proving" something... well, give me a break. An economist can throw light on things, and come up with good ideas, but the idea of them proving things is, in most cases, absurd.
The only good weather is bad weather.
It's quite misguided to say the patent system as a whole is no good. Patents work well in some situations but not others. You can't cite a couple of bad cases from the software industry and conculde that the patent system is broken altogether.
E.g. pharmaceutical companies need to do a lot of research before creating new useful medicine. Research costs money and they can't make it back within just a couple of months of being first-to-market. They get a few years to control the market, make a profit, and move on. Another example, if you invent a better shovel, it'll be copied within a month easy, and there is no way you can make a profit from being first-to-market because people don't buy shovels every month. You need a patent of a few years to let you make some decent profit.
Patents work well for some industries but not others. There is also the way patents are used. Dolby Labs made a great use of their invention in noise reduction system. Nobody boycotts Dolby Labs, in fact everybody welcomes them, even though their patent and licensing increased the price of audio-visual equipment.
Dolby invented something, made it available to the public while making an honest profit and everybody's happy. Contrast that to the company who pops up with some vague patent and issues C&Ds or ridiculous invoices to the world, years after the public adoption of the patented system. We need to address and fix the latter stunts, not drop the entire patent system.
Here's a question for the opinionated Slashdot crowd...
Is it legit, ie: won't have me tied up with lawsuits for the next several years, to use patented technology for personal applications?
Think, perhaps, of a power-generation system that would be suitable for a small hobby farm. If I took the patent, built it, and used it on my own land, but did not sell it, am I violating the patent?