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Mistakes Found in 98% of US Patents
Artem Tashkinov writes to tell us The Register is reporting that almost every US patent contains at least one mistake. The findings from a recent look by Itellevate, a firm that offers support services to intellectual property lawyers, claim that most of these errors are trivial but approximately 2 percent of the patents examined had errors that weakened the core claims of the patent itself.
I'm disappointed that they didn't offer up any examples. Of course it would be highly embarrassing to whoever filed it, and it would be a bad idea legally, but it'd be interesting to see how badly some people screwed up.
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
My experience says that Indians speak/write english better than citizens of many english speaking countries. This is one of biggest advantage they have over China. 'Vast pool of english educated people'.
Publishers like Wrox, O'Reilly etc had already established offices in India for editing and proofreading.
Now get your head out.
hilarious
Laugh all you want, but you really have two choices in the matter. As an examiner, we get on average somewhere near 25 hours a case. That's it. Pick one of the following:
1. Find good prior art.
2. Find spelling mistakes.
My boss yells at me when I point out a spelling mistake on page 13 of the specification because it means I wasted my time doing something other than look for prior art.
The sole issue in this appeal is the meaning of the following language in a patent claim: "heating the resulting batter-coated dough to a temperature in the range of about 400 F. to 850 F." The question is whether the dough itself is to be heated to that temperature (as the district court held), or whether the claim only specifies the temperature at which the dough is to be heated, i.e., the temperature of the oven (as the appellant contends). We agree with the district court that the claim means what it says (the dough is to be heated "to" the designated temperature range) and therefore affirm [the trial court's finding of non-infringement].
As most people know, dough heated to 850 degrees F. is no longer dough - it is charcoal. Not the most effective result for a process that is intended to result in the production of an edible substance.
BTW - the two law firms who tried this case are two of the top firms in the US. I am confident that the parties each spent hundreds of thousands of dollars arguing over a single word. And a very short word at that.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
Despite what the linked article claims, this is NOT an appropriate activity to be offshored. It requires not only careful reading but mastery of both the English language and the technical terms of art.
What makes you think the proof-readers in India lack the above qualifications? English is the main language used for official communication in India (unlike other countries like China, Japan, etc.), and the people doing these types of jobs, probably have had all their education in English.
By the way - I think it is a universally accepted axiom (at least as universally accepted as the Theory of Evolution - but that's a topic for another post ...) that it is better to catch errors at the beginning of a process to prevent errors in the finished product than it is to perform quality control at the end of the process to attempt to fix the end product. In the US (and some other countries) you need a license to file your patent application in a foreign country. Generally the license is automatically granted when the filing is confirmed by the USPTO, but nevertheless you still need the license. If you send an unfiled patent application for an invention created in the US out of the country for proofreading, you may have violated export control laws.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
From what I've seen in the past, some code had been outsourced to others where 'spelling', wasn't important with regards to the grammar of the language in which the program was developed, but in the 'comments' of the code, it was important to a future developer that might need to work with it.
Now, I've also seen some cases where 'elements' in code were just mispelled; didn't affect the way the program executed, but irritated my 'sensibilities'. I find it odd to 'Initilize' things often. Attempting to 'correct' this portion of code is a one day project at best which might offend someone.
78.35% of statistics made up on the spot!
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