Inside Look at Patent Examination

KingFatty writes "This article written by a former patent examiner describes patent application as a matter of luck when it comes to the competency of the examiner. "Every examiner starts with his or her first patent application after receiving just two weeks of training at the USPTO Patent Academy, where he or she learns the basics of the Manual of Patent Examining Procedure. Will your patent application be examined by that newly recruited examiner? If so, will the examiner's supervisor (supervisory patent examiner or SPE)[be] sufficiently skilled in the art in which the patent application is classified?" Gives insights as to the problems with the US Patent and Trademark System."

Comments

Re:Hamstrung When Looking for Prior Art?

[Anonymous Coward]

As best as I can tell the examiners are limited to prior patent applications and official publications in searching for prior art.

As a former USPTO examiner, I can say that it is not a matter of prior art availability. An examiner has pretty much all of the prior art they wish for in their examination. It is not just the old patent "shoes" and prior patents. Examiners have access to a large number of private databases, the Internet, foreign language translation services ... what have you.

What is limited is the time the examiner has to thoroughly investigate all possibly relevant prior art. Patent examiners in the USPTO are subject to "productivity" expectations, and if they spend too much time on any particular application, then another application will suffer from insufficient review. Moreover, it is highly unlikely that any particular patent application will come back to bite them. The system (like many others) is geared toward looking at numbers and not quality.

Re:Huge Patent Issues

[jmullen]

Working as a patent agent at a top IP law firm, I am probably biased. Nonetheless, I will provide you with your answer. People that patent their ideas have made a working model of their invention in a way. In order for a patent, your application has to "enable one skilled in the art at the time the invention was made" to build and operate the invention. You can't patent ideas. You can't say "i want to patent an antigravity device." However, if you come up with a way to make an antigravity device you have to disclose how to make one. If you do not disclose how to make it then the patent will not be valid because 1) it will not be an enabling disclosure; and 2) you will not have described the best mode. Now, we want people to patent things. Patents are one of the reasons why technology is blooming. Before the patent system was utilized, companies would keep ideas secret as ... trade secrets. Now, they are utilizing the patent system in which the government gives them a 20 year limited monopoly (i.e., the reason why there will never be an antitrust issue because of a patent, just business practices) in exchange for the public disclosure of how to make and use the invention. Those are the facts. Jeff