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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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