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.

Filing a patent...

[matchlight]

requires the filee to do proper research. The fact that this position exists does not mean you can get an idea, file it and get it approved and it be legit. This person is only there as a last attempt at trying to weed out the duplicates.
Given the increase in complexity for these filings, doing your own research appears to be even more important that ever. I've gone through the process with mixed success. Even when proper research is done by the person filing and the patent office, you can still miss something.

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

[mesocyclone]

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.

Re:Evidence that the system is a failure

[bug-eyed monster]

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.

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.

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.

Rich and powerful interests want bad patents.

[Futurepower(R)]

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.

A day in the life of a patent examiner

[Dark Lord Seth]

09:00: Get up, sniff glue
09:30: Read newspaper, lick a poisonous toad
10:30: Arrive at work, get high on cough syrup
10:31: Review patents
17:30: Go home, yell at imaginairy wife, pass out on a skittle frenzy

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.

Maybe someone should...

[thewils]

...patent a new method of submitting patents to the patent office.

Using Patents

[mindhaze]

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?

Re:Acacia and streaming video/audio patent

[Tablizer]

over the last year there has been a company claiming a patent on streaming video/audio, (ie not live) but anything recorded that gets d/l and then is played back on a computer......Some of you might not care and say well its the adult industry let them get screwed

All the porn industry has to do is threaten to withold any porn from ever being seen by the patent threatening company's employees. "You will never see another naked woman besides your wife again if you press this patent on us."

A threat like that has to work.

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.