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USPTO Peer Review Process To Begin Soon
An anonymous reader writes "As we've discussed several times before on Slashdot, the US patent office is looking to employ a Wiki-like process for reviewing patents. It's nowhere near as open as Wikipedia, but there are still numerous comparisons drawn to the well-known project in this Washington Post story. Patent office officials site the huge workload their case officers must deal with in order to handle the modern cycle of product development. Last year some 332,000 applications were handled by only 4,000 employees. 'The tremendous workload has often left examiners with little time to conduct thorough reviews, according to sympathetic critics. Under the pilot project, some companies submitting patent applications will agree to have them reviewed via the Internet. The list of volunteers already contains some of the most prominent names in computing, including Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, as well as IBM, though other applicants are welcome.'"
Why employ as "volunteers" from Oracle, HP, IBM, etc., which are known patent abusers?
Why not employ unemployed qualified volunteers and also pay them to do a peer review.
That way you solve two problems:
1. Boost employment to qualified people.
2. Prevent any bias since the people used by USPTO are unemployed anyway.
But, then like all other half-as$ed efforts by any Govt. agency, they will allow ballot stuffing by Microsoft and IBM....
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
So each worker had to look at 83 of them PER YEAR
How the hell is this alot?
If we let Microsoft employees do this work for the Patent Office, I can only imagine what sorts of patents are going to get approved. M$ will have every patent under the sun. Somehow, I don't think letting huge corporate interests "assist" the government would make the process better.
Part of the hardcore faithful who believed in Apple long before it was cool again to do so
No they don't.
The purpose of patent protection is to grant the right of a person who comes up with something great to profit from it.
Without such protections, someone would invent something and then die of starvation before seeing any kind of profit. While he is trying to produce his invention, some megacorp would take his idea and put it in mass production and beat him to his own market. The inventor would be left with jack because noone would have to pay him to produce his innovation for themselves.
to grant the right of a person who comes up with something great to profit from it.
/sarcasm
Yes because clicking a mouse button in order to buy something is a fabulous idea - the inventor should earn 3.0 x 10^11 dollars for that.
someone would invent something and then die of starvation before seeing any kind of profit.
Yes because one click shopping is the only thing that made Amazon what it is today - if it wasn't for their patent on one click shopping, Amazon surely would have gone out of business by now.
While he is trying to produce his invention, some megacorp would take his idea and put it in mass production and beat him to his own market.
Yes, thank God that the "megacorps" don't steal/buy patent ideas for pennies on the dollar, and then put them into mass production, and use the threat of litigation to keep everyone else out of the market. Patents are used exclusively by the little guy to defend himself from these huge entities.
HELLO? Exactly which world are you living in? Your points are completely invalid due to the very abuses of the patent system that need to be corrected. As it currently stands, the patent system is NOT doing its job but getting in the way of progress since you can't come up with something new without risking some sort of litigation from someone with ambiguous patent claims.
Perhaps getting rid of them all together WOULD be a step in the right direction. That way we go back to trade secrets - you have a great idea, you keep your mouth shut, develop it, and try to be better than the other guy when competition arrives.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
How is this not Slash [wikipedia.org], from our truly and good Slashdot? Everything is there, from Score to karma to Mod points. This is far from being wiki, and much more like being slash.
It's supposed to be, they consulted CndrTaco about it. It has even more elements of eBay and Amazon as well. I don't think it has much to do with the Wikipedia process at all from what I can tell.
Apparently "citing" Wikipedia is based on pure name recognition and easier to understand than slashdot/eBay/Amazon (and who knows, probably shades of Google PageRank will be in there as well).
rd
... maybe they could start peer reviewingOnly to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
Of course, no one denies that the patent system needs change--most likely a significant reform. The Patent Office knows this!! They are currently hiring thousands of examiners to help deal with the backlog. They have instituted hotelling programs to allow examiners to work from remote locations, thus freeing up valuable office space for new examiners. The Office is constantly developing new search tools to better help examiners locate prior art, especially for business method and software patents which can be very hard to invalidate.
Remember, the law as it currently stands states, "A person shall be entitled to a patent unless..." Thus, the burden is on the examiner to PROVE that a patent should not be granted. This can be VERY hard, even when the technology appears clearly to be unpatentable.
I have to say, I am very surprised at some of the comments coming from such an educated group of people. Destructive criticism will get us nowhere.
Notwithstanding the problems of our current system, patents ARE important for protecting innovation. Countries from around the world recognize this, and, believe it or not, try to emulate our system for the protection of intellectual property.
Give the Patent Office some credit here. This is a DRASTIC and REVOLUTIONARY change they are trying to institute here. It is VERY progressive, and it seems very in-tune with the open-source trend in information sharing and collaboration. They clearly recognize the need for change, and they really are working to find the right solution.
So before you start ranting about how the patent office sucks and how patents should be abolished. Take some time to think about why patents fundamentally encourage and protect innovation, and why the job facing the Patent Office is not so easy.
Again, everyone is looking for a better solution. That is why the Office is testing this program! Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. One thing, however, is sure: unhelpful and unreasonable criticisms from close-minded individuals do not help.
(Former patent examiner here)
The vast majority (I'd say 98%) of patent apps are initially reviewed and rejected, but the attorney usually argues the rejection and/or adjusts the claims and sends the aplicaiton back. So the examiner has to re-review the application, and this back-and-forth action often goes on for months or years before the patent is finally issued or abandoned.
So really, each examiner is looking at twice as many applications a week as you think they are. Even though half of them are ones they've already seen, it typically takes 3-6 months to get a reply, and by then it's hard to remember all the details. Also, the claims are often so changed that a whole new prior art search is required. As Tom noted, it sometimes takes a while to dig up the prior art to shoot down each claim, even if the invention is clearly obvious.
At least in my art unit, it was rare to find an application with a spec that was under 20 pages and had less than 30 claims. I'd say 40-90 claims was the average. That's a lot of material to sift through, especially for entry-level engineers with little experience in the industry (which comprise the PTO's vast majority of employees). When I worked there, it was pretty standard for patent examiners to work 10 hour days in addition to Saturdays or Sundays, and not get paid for the overtime.
Without such protections, someone would invent something and then die of starvation before seeing any kind of profit. While he is trying to produce his invention, some megacorp would take his idea and put it in mass production and beat him to his own market. The inventor would be left with jack because noone would have to pay him to produce his innovation for themselves.
Which RCA did to Farnsworth even though he had a patent, so what's your argument?
Linux, you magnificent bastard, I read the fucking manual!