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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.
What's a trivial, and where can I get one?
Is it like a tribble?
98% of patents are mistakenly granted too!
In other breaking news, Jimmy Hoffa was found today on a park bench clutching a newspaper whose headline read "Sun found to be hot!" and "Sky really is blue!".
Patents..wrong..who would've thunk it?
"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield." - Tennyson
Whoa, you mean people actually read patents?
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.
The vast majority are trivial errors, most of them the fault of the USPTO
You mean errors while transcripting? Or do they intentionally introduce errors just because they get a kick out of it?
~Ilyanep
To get message, take amount of carrier pigeons at each stage mod 2. Then decode binary.
That's why the USPTO has something called a "Certificate of Correction." Many of the mistakes are allowed to remain because it isn't worth the cost of filing for correction. I'll be the first to admit that many others are there because of a lack of due care. However, careful practitioners have at least one other person (more often two other people) besides the drafter proofread the application before it is sent to the PTO and the drafter also proofs the published patent if the application is allowed to issue. 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. The USPTO is much like a computer in at least one respect - it follows the GIGO rule for data processing.
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
As with everything you read, please consider the source. In this case, the sole source of the facts here is a firm that specializes in support services for patents. That's not to say that their findings are incorrect, but you should do your own research before quoting or taking other action based on their results.
I find it absolutely impossible to believe that people are incapable of writing a single sentance without making a mistake.
Do you want to know another thing that I think is wrong with the patent system? You do? Great. I think patents are too expensive for the average individual and too cheap for the average corporation. Too bad I don't have any suggestion to make the patent system better.
Religion for nerds. Stuff that really matters
Did you also know that 98% of Slashdot summaries have errors??
really? I thought all of them had!
(the above line is a joke. If you don't get it, feel free to "-1, troll" away.)
My other account has mod points.
Patent Number : US6123456 : 12/23/2003 : System and method for providing exsellent spelchecking.
Issue Date
Patent Title
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PT O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,960,975.WKU.&OS=PN/6,960,975&RS =PN/6,960,975
T O1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=/netahtml/srchnum.htm &r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,368,227.WKU.&OS=PN/6,368,227&RS =PN/6,368,227
For it's defyance of the laws of physics?
or...
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=P
This one; recanted because of a technicallity in its wording, even though it's trying to patent swinging on a swing. (Both links were off wikipedia)
Demented But Determined.
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
From a recent New Yorker article detailing R.I.M.'s patent problems and "patent trolls", "since the office (the patent office) is funded by patent fees, as opposed to getting its budget from Washington, it has a financial incentive to process applications as quickly, rather than diligently, as possible".
Examiners spend between 12 and 22 hours per patent, with an acceptance rate in the U.S. of ninety-five percent...no wonders there's so many errors.
How are they arriving at this conclusion? Did they go through and review every single patent that's been issued? I doubt that somehow. I'd appreciate it if TFA made it more clear how they ended up with this statistic. My initial guess would be that they simply sampled a subset of the issued patents, and decided that this was representative of the entire body of issued patents.
I have invented a new method of finding patent mistakes which is more accurate and shows that 100% of patents have mistakes.
7h3$3 4r3n'7 7h3 Ðr01Ð$ ¥0 4r3 £00|{1n9 f0r. M0v3 4£0n9. --OB1
In other words, nothing to see here. Only adds to the shrillness factor of the anti-patent crowd. Many patents are questionable at best, but a 2% rate of "trivial" errors is a non-issue.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
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.
It would be only ~5% with all the dupes!
"Intellevate has developed proprietary tools that automate part of the proofreading process and has built a team of legal assistants in India who are thoroughly trained and specialise in proofreading services," said Steinberg
Um... ever tried to deal with a Dell or Symantec issue? Are you really trying to spin Indian support as a good thing? My word...
all those patent lawyers probably graduated from the colleges that are turning out barely literate graduates... convenient seque
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
From what it's saying 2% are definately invalid and 96% of the rest are legally questionable. Given the state of our legal system the majority of the patents may not hold up in court. Why does this matter? Possibly legal chaos. Every lawyer in the country could get rich trying to sort the mess out. If half the companies sue the other half of the companies in an effort to invailidate their patents we're talking legal gridlock. People may not live long enough to see legitimate cases come to trial. Hard to say what will actually happen but the potential is frightening.
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.
Most of the mistakes are going to be spelling errors, an omitted punctuation, et cetra.
Good example: you misspelled cetera.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
Well, apparently you're incorrect.
TFA says that these errors are significant and they weaken the core claims of the patent.
I don't understand how you can spout something contrary to the findings of a fairly lengthy review and get modded Insightful.
If you didn't learn it in grammar school, allow me to inform you that omitted punctuation is not just a "speed bump to reading." Omitted commas or other forms of punctuation can wildly change the interpretation of a sentence.
This is why local politics can devolve into petty battles over commas and words, because just one word or one comma can change the way a law gets applied.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.
It seems like it might be in this firm's interest to find the tiniest error in each patent. Even grammatical or typographical errors like the wrong number of spaces after a period or a sentence without a verb in it (like this one). Also, they could have chosen their sample to suit their needs (i.e., search for 98 patents with errors and 2 without and call it a random sample). Maybe I'm just too suspicious.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
I translate technical Japanese patents and the great majority are so poorly written as to be unintelligible in parts.
I recall several instances where after transcribing a taped letter, verbatim (with my own spellings of the words transcribed, of course) that the attorney would read, cross out lines, add words, change statements, etc., until the letter that was transcribed was absolutely different from what was put on audio tape.
Then, when the 'final' product was rendered to the 'printed word', it was reviewed once again and had usually two or more changes, usually re-arranging a statement or adding some other synonym.
As one other Slashdotter respondent noted, it would be nice if everyone had learned to "clean up after themselves"; however, in this case, I think it is more of some person hoping that hindsight is "20/20". (I wonder if someone is going to actually patent 'hindsight'.)
It's interesting to see that someone is taking a 'janitorial' point of view on this mess. Not sure what can of worms it could open up potentially, but in the end, we usually end up paying for our mistakes.
Lawsuits :-) for everyone! I bet is a law firm had stock, they would increase by like 5% right now.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
mistakes are found in 98% of human-written documents? By the way, this article seems like a great ad for Intellevate (company name mentioned seven times in eight paragraphs!) with very slim content.
For a second I thought you had meant Bill O'Reilly had his copyediting done in India.
The hypocrisy would have made heads explode.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Company that offers help with filing patents finds that 98% of people filing patents really should hire them. More at 11.
While punctuation changes can indeed wildly change the meaning of a sentence, as the GP said, usually they don't. Also, english (and all natural languages) are inherently ambigious. -- lots of constructions have multiple well defined contradictory meanings.
And, TFA says that while 98% of patents have errors, only 2% of patents have errors that jeapordize the claims. I think it is safe to say that most of those errors are mere speed bumps to reading.
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.
...understand 98% of patents.
It is a 100% mistake to assume that society won't get its needs successfully met without granting these useless monopolies that pretend to incentivize R&D and pretend to "protect" inventors.
The other 2% get rejected.
The red thing's connected to my...wristwatch. Uh oh.
"We are Samurai, the Keyboard...Cowboys"
Please when you read the article, don't forget who is behind the study.
This is one of those typical statistical claims that people use to push their products. In this case, it is a company specialized in helping people to make their patent filings and they try to use statistics to scare people making them think that their patent filings might be invalid due to mistakes and thus hope they use the services of the company.
If you really want reliable statistics on the number of patent filings with mistakes and on the consequences off those mistakes, you should never trust such claims from a company who uses them purely for marketing purposes. This is a bit similar to Microsoft's TCO claims on Windows versus Linux.
I simply say that the source of these statistics is biased and as such the statistics are unreliable. They might or might or might not be true, but I would certainly not trust them.
Marcel
I wonder if it occured to the clerk who approved this drivvel that those three words are basically normal state of a pressurized body. (waiting to explode)
Wait, wouldn't that be any launched space vehicle?
78.35% of statistics made up on the spot!
This and other exciting stories tonight at 11...
'coz we publish the largest number of books in English? 'coz we've been speaking English for about as long as you guys have in the US? 'coz there are about 11 million or s people in India who count English as their first language?
More than mere navel gazing.
as a small entity (individual) you can file a patent with about 100 bucks, to preserver your priority date, and have a year to raise the 600 dollars needed for a regular app fee
u write the patent yourself
if you cant figure out how to write patnet your self,or are to lazy, u don't deserve it
a patent is a lot of work, but any ordinary person who can write a coherent paragraph should be able to figure out how to do it
In fact, writing a patnet would be a good subsitute for a college degree - about an equiv amount of knowledge
In any case, the mistake of and by itself is of little consequence. There are few patents so rock-solid that they can't be attacked by finding other chinks in their armor: appeals to "obviousness", prior art, prior disclosure, or jsut the threat of a lawsuit are often enough.
They proofread 5000 patents.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
I am not surprised that the number is that high.
I have a software patent that has been awaiting US Patent office approval for 2 years now. The text of the patent is nearly incomprehensible due to the lawyer rewriting the entire document into legalese. I honestly could not produce the software I patented from the lawyer's version.
Maybe the 2% are possibly ones that the lawyer is also the inventor, so they can get the point across in legal speak and still have the point intact.
You can lose something that is loose, so tighten the loose item so you don't lose it.
Actually, India is an English speaking country. English is one of the official languages there.
A panda walks into a bar. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
"Why? Why are you behaving in this strange, un-panda-like fashion?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda walks towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
"I'm a panda," he says, at the door. "Look it up."
The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.
"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."
We are talking about 98% of patents containing some error. Now, 2% have serious errors and that is something that should be addressed but the rest of it is just bullshit. First off, what are these errors? Are they small grammar and spelling issues? Hell, half the people on slashdot cannot use the English language properly. Let's put this into perspective. We are talking about finding an error in a specification to a patent which can sometimes run 50 pages in length. As everyone is so fond of pointing out, the Patent Office has a large backlog of patents and there are complaints of patents getting issued that should not be. So imagine how poor examination would be if they needed to proofread the entire thing for grammar and spelling errors which have no real effect on the patent itself.
Let us also remember that the people who examine these patents are Engineers and Scientists. I do not know how many Engineers and Scientist you know, but many of the ones I do are not usually the best with the grammar and spelling; I sometimes have to read sentences several times over before I believe it sounds right, and even then it is usually still wrong in some way. The fact is the USPTO does not have the manpower or the time to be fixing every grammatical mistake that may occur in a patent, and I would venture a guess that it is frowned upon because it takes away from the actual prosecution on the merits of the application.
As a final note, many patents come in from Asian countries that are simply translated by machine and not proofread to their fullest extent. If a translation of this sort is very poor then examiners can inform the applicant that examination is not possible because of the poor grammar and request a more appropriate translation. I really wouldn't be surprised if many of the other patent offices have similar problems with minor errors.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
The spacetime curvature imbalance, the spacetime curvature being the same as gravity, provides for the space vehicle's propulsion. The space vehicle, surrounded by the spacetime anomaly, may move at a speed approaching the light-speed characteristic for the modified locale.
Hmmm... This sounds suspiciously familiar...
In the fictional universe of Star Trek, the warp drive is a form of faster-than-light (FTL) propulsion. - From WikiPedia
Can you patent an invention that was explained in sci fi?
"I'm a Laver, not a Phyto[plankton]"
How can we expect 10,000-word patent applications and their appendant illustrations to be free from even trivial errors, when a 65-word story can't even use correct grammar or get the subject's name right?
Because a 65 word story cannot hope to achieve anything more than a Slashdotting. A patent can hope to cripple an entire industry.
May the Maths Be with you!
Lawyers were paid by the word so the more words they crammed in the more they were paid. It became a standard practice and soon the required approach to litigation whereas later they decried, "Cover all thy bases." It's the point of the joke.
For those of you who RTF, you'll recognize it here again... only this time, as THE COMPANY PRESS RELEASE.
T O.pdf
http://www.intellevate.com/india/MistakesFoundUSP
Great PR.
Ironically, when the USPO tried to automate some of their systems, it was found that the systems that they were trying to create were protected by patents.
copyright © 2005 Flamsmsmark the ravings of a melancholly i
As someone who has a few patents to his name and several more pending, I can say that if the invention your patent describes is unreproducable to you or anyone else skilled in the relevent field, it is a very bad patent, and it's *your* fault -- not the lawyers.
Sure, it sounds to me like you have a crap patent lawyer, but it's your job to push back and revise it so it does make sense and so it accurately describes your invention.
Even with a good lawyer who really understands your invention, this can take several iterations.
For you slashdotters out there who are looking for a good patent firm, Two that I've worked with and I thought were very good are Stearne, Kessler, Goldstein & Fox (www.skgf.com), and Staas & Halsey (www.stassandhalsey.com).
While it's been a few years, I particularly enjoyed working with Mike Ray of SKGF -- he's very sharp, and really good at explaining *why* things are written the way they are in your patent.
Ian Ameline
Be fair. Those who live in India, or recently emigrated from India could well find that Indian
support is very good indeed.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.