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

Peer review

[sweet cunny muffin]

Why aren't patents exposed to peer review, like academic articles are? The invention (if it is) will be protected by the patent pending laws while it's reviewed.

Re:Peer review

[nodwick]

Why aren't patents exposed to peer review, like academic articles are? The invention (if it is) will be protected by the patent pending laws while it's reviewed.

Having had some experience with the academic peer review process, from both the reviewer and reviewee perspective, I feel obligated to point out that the peer review process is far from perfect as well. Off the top of my head, a couple of points to consider:

1. Finding qualified reviewers. Many academics in my field (network theory) have been complaining about "reviewer burnout". Simply put, any popular field will have lots of people submitting papers [patents, in your analogy] in an effort to boost their publications. Oftentimes, many of these people will submit stuff that's obviously not publication-quality material, but reviewers still have to spend their time first to evaluate it and then to produce a good writeup justifying rejecting it. To be sure, there are still good papers, but the general experience seems to be that the signal-to-noise ratio of submissions is directly inverse to the popularity of the field. Imagine how much worse this would be for patents, where the payoff is not just CV bragging rights but actual profit dollars.

The end result is that it's difficult to get quality reviews, because the reviewers (who, by definition of peer review, tend to be very busy professionals who already have a lot to do) get burned out and are tempted to just breeze through reviews. Since the patent office gets many more patent applications than your typical journal, I'd imagine this would be an even bigger problem for patents.

2. Finding honest reviewers. By making patents peer-reviewed, you're forcing applicants to disclose the details of their technology to their peers before their patent is accepted. A similar situation exists in academia where often multiple research groups are working on the same research project. Sadly, it's not unheard of for particular reviewers to stonewall acceptance of papers because they have similar results which they are submitting / hope to submit soon to another journal. Imagine how, in the case of patent review where people are competing not just for notoriety but for profits, an even bigger incentive would exist for this sort of thing to go on.

I understand that your point is that it would be nice to have highly qualified individuals doing patent reviews, which would hopefully inject more common sense into the proceedings. I'm just saying that setting up such a system may hhave its own problems to iron out.

Huge Patent Issues

[cexshun]

I feel the largest problem with the patent system is allowing people to patent "ideas" without a working prototype. I think this can and will lead to intuitive innovations being passed over because the manufacturer would have to pay patent fees to the "inventor". Total BS.

If the "inventor" didn't have the balls to put his/her money where their mouth is, then they don't deserve shit! Let's not punish companies willing to put forth money into a great idea by making them pay some lazy ass moron who payed a small patent fee to patent his idea of clapping to turn on a light.

Re:Huge Patent Issues

[alen]

But isn't this going to punish the small inventor that may not have the financial resources or VC contacts to profit from their ideas?

Re:Huge Patent Issues

[Kenja]

So only large corporations that can afford R&D labs should be able to get patents? Thats sort of the opposite of what patents where intended for. You patent the idea, and then go and find someone to back the project and produce the prototype.

Re:Huge Patent Issues

[zero_offset]

A utility patent is the full-blown patent. Right now, getting one can be as cheap as about $4000, but it can run up into the $15K range. It depends on a whole bunch of factors.

What most regular folks do (e.g. individuals who aren't a patent factory like IBM, 3M, GE, etc) is file for a provisional patent. This is a relatively cheap process (in the neighborhood of $1500) which protects the basic idea for one year, with the intent of allowing you to file changes (improvements) to the basic claim. That's the INTENT -- because changing a "real" utility patent is very time consuming and expensive.

What most people actually use the provisional patent for is to protect their idea while they shop it around to investors and licensees. Then you make it a condition of the licensing that the first licensee pays for the full-blown patent expenses (or something along those same lines).

But it should actually be pretty rare for the expenses to run as high as $10K. (I happen to be in the process of patenting something, and luckily a friend of mine is a patent attorney.)

If it's so poorly researched,

[empaler]

Then why the hell do companies have to write 'Patents Pending' on their products for decades? You'd think that incompetency of this sort would speed up the process.
"Did a search on Google for some of the keywords in their description, but only a few thousand webpages came up... Patent Granted, next!"

On the inside

[Mateito]

Sorry to disagree with the article, but the best way to get an inside look at a patent examener is with a blunt object.

Yeah, I know its a hard job.. but even the worst fuck-up gets it right once in a while.

The solution is simple. Pay the experts what they are worth to do the job. Just like they should with teachers. Its never going to happen.

There is way too much money to be made in having IP control over an uneducated populace.

Re:Possible Solution

[cbcbcb]

No. That way the chances of getting a patent approved are proportional to the number you submit, so big companies would file more, and smaller companies and sole inventors would be essentially unable to get patents.

Re:Give them a zero budget.

[Peyna]

"To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"

- US Constitution, Article I, Section 8.

Good luck getting that changed anytime soon.