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Inside Look at Patent Examination

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the something-to-think-about dept.

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."

2 of 214 comments (clear)

  1. Peer review by sweet+cunny+muffin · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Peer review by nodwick · · Score: 5, Insightful
      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.