So if two companies set out to solve a problem and eventually develop the same solution after each investing thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars in R&D, you think that means the invention was obvious? Really?
The difference is that Oregon's constitution says "expression" rather than "speech." One could reasonably argue that getting naked doesn't qualify as "speech," but it's much harder to argue that it's not a form of expression.
When you submit a paper, it goes on record as having been considered in the examination process. The examiner might or might not follow up on citations in a submitted paper, but those citations aren't automatically recorded as having been considered; which is why you don't have to submit full copies of them.
I am a patent examiner, and your understanding is wrong. Applicants must submit complete copies of journal articles if they want the article considered. Also, they don't *have* to explain how your invention is different, although it might be a good idea to do so.
You might be "+5 Insightful," but you're also wrong. Inventors have a 1-year window after publishing in which they can file their application. This is true under both the old laws and the new.
I love how the people with mod points don't let a little thing like not knowing anything about patent law get in the way of their pronouncing a post that (incorrectly) tries to explain a point of patent law as "insightful."
Really? You think there are sites already doing this?
Claim 1 is:1. A method for representing ownership of an asset in a social network environment, the method comprising: receiving a request from a first user of the social network environment to purchase the asset for a second user; recording information about a purchase of the asset from a vendor; associating, by a server for the social networking environment, the purchased asset with a profile of the second user; sending for display to a viewing user an association between the purchased asset and the second user on a feed display page; sending for display to the viewing user, in connection with the association between the purchased asset and the second user, information indicating that a third user, with whom the viewing user has established a connection in the social network, owns the asset, and information including a name of the first user who gave the asset to the second user, on the feed display page.
So please, by all means tell me what sites are already doing this. Since you think there are lots of sites already doing this, it should be quite easy for you to list a few. I can't wait...
No, it's not. Slashdot's mod up/down system would only be relevant prior art if it was able to automatically rate new comments by analyzing the ratings of similar previous comments. But I love how it's impossible for there to be a patent story on slashdot without a hoard of people shouting "prior art! prior art!" about irrelevant bullshit because they haven't actually read the patent...
The summary of the patent does not actually describe what the patent is about. I know, it's shocking to think that such a thing could happen on slashdot.
Claim 1 is:
1. A computer-implemented method of approving a document, the method comprising: analyzing content of a first document to identify one or more first portions, wherein the first portions are visual, textual, or audio portions; identifying one or more second documents that are similar to the first document, wherein the one or more second documents have second portions that are visual, textual, or audio portions; based upon computer code that describes the first portions and the second portions, determining whether any of the first portions are substantially identical to the second portions that have been predetermined to be unacceptable; and approving the first document only if none of the first portions are substantially identical to the second portions that have been predetermined to be unacceptable.
But let's not do anything crazy like actually reading the patent before we start discussing it...
I do NOT see how this would help the backlog. It's not going to speed up the examination process any. And under a first-to-file system, companies are encouraged to file an application for every tiny little incremental improvement, rather than a single application at the end of their R&D cycle. It will probably greatly increase the number of applications.
The bargain inherent in the patent system is that you get patent protection in exchange for teaching your idea to the world. If you invent something but keep it secret, you haven't fulfilled your part of the bargain and you don't deserve anything, because you haven't actually benefited society yet. It makes sense that the patent system would reward the first person to actually teach their invention to the world, rather than rewarding someone who invented something and then sat quietly on it.
The PTO has about a 25% allowance rate, so assuming IBM's applications are "average," they would have to file about 20000 applications to get those 5000 patents. Of course, they might have a strategy of filing tons of very narrow (and so easy to get) applications rather than fewer broader (and so harder to get) applications.
Software or an algorithm AREN'T patentable. If you submit a patent application for some software code or an algorithm per se it will be immediately rejected as non-patentable subject matter.
Computer code is not patentable. If you actually read a "software patent," you'll see that they claim something along the lines of "A computer-based method for doing X, comprising using a computer to calculate A, B, and C, running operation Y on values A, B and C, then doing Z." If you try to file an application for "a computer program for doing X, comprising..." it will be swiftly rejected as not patentable subject matter.
1) As I recall, there are procedures to amend a rejected application or to appeal a rejection. If those procedures are routinely exercised and the submissions are not considered new applications, then the total processing time of an approved patent will be significantly shorter than that of a rejected one. This gives a strong incentive to grant a patent over rejecting it.
Examiners receive work credit for examining amended applications or applications in which the applicant has requested a continued examination after a final rejection has been issued. It is actually much more work to allow a patent than to reject it, since as soon as your find prior art that reads on an application, you're done and you can move on to the next one. If you don't find prior art, on the other hand, it means you'll have to spend a LOT of time carefully reviewing anything and everything that might be relevant, or run the risk of getting nailed by Quality Assurance later on.
2) When does a patent application get reviewed for being improperly rejected or improperly allowed? If an improper rejection review can triggered by a submitter''s complaint but an improper allowance only comes to light after competitors sue over the patent, it gives another strong incentive to grant a patent over rejecting it.
An examiner's work is regularly reviewed by the "quality assurance" people, a sinister and mysterious group that pulls a sampling of recent work and scrutinizes it. Anything that an examiner allows is much more likely to be reviewed, and will generally be reviewed in much more detail, than something that they reject. The "safe" way for an examiner to slack off without too much risk of getting into trouble is to slap together bullshit obviousness rejections, since the quality assurance people focus so much on anything that gets allowed and not so much on things that get rejected. To balance out the incentives that the Quality Assurance people might give an examiner to just reject everything, applicants have various options for appealing rejections that they feel are improper.
I prefer to treat it as "not bullshit" until you address my points above.
He said that the PTO uses allowed applications as the metric for efficiency. That is most certainly bullshit, regardless of any of the points that you raised.
The law says that a patent can't be granted on an invention that would be obvious to one of ORDINARY skill in the art. Something might be obvious to a person of extraordinary intelligence, skill, and experience, but that doesn't mean it's not patentable.
As for something being obvious just because it was developed nearly-simultaneously, you ignore the fact that competing companies often invest vast amounts of money and manpower into researching the same problem, only to come to about the same solution. I wouldn't say that an invention was obvious just because two different entities independently invented it if both entities had to invest millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours into the research.
I would argue that independent invention without exposure to the other's work should simply invalidate the patent right off the bat. If two people are filing a patent on the same invention, unless they were working together at some point in the past or one of them stole research from the other in some way, that means the patent covers something that is obvious to a practitioner in the field, and is not patentable in the first place.
What a ridiculous assertion. If two companies each set out to solve a problem, and after each investing millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man-hours into the research eventually come up with very similar solutions, you think that means the solution was "obvious"?
That patent was filed in 1993. Do you know of a published reference teaching the patent's claims from BEFORE the patent was filed? Laser pointers weren't so cheap and plentiful back then...
I work for the patent office. It's actually very hard to get a patent. As a general rule, application examiners with the PTO try hard to reject everything, and they usually succeed. But there are something like 700,000 patent applications filed each year, and much of them are for stupid obvious crap. Even if 99.99% of the crap is caught and rejected, that still means that every year dozens of stupid thing will slip through the cracks and get issued, and people on slashdot will point to that tiny number of mistakes as proof that the PTO isn't doing it's job.
And that's fair enough, because if ANY patents that shouldn't be issued get issued, it means we screwed up. But you're utterly wrong in your assertion that "It has become disgustingly easy to patent something that really should not be patentable." Sure, if you file tens of thousands of applications for stupid obvious crap, then you might have a few of them slip through; but that's hardly an "easy" way to get a patent. Using your logic, I could point at the tiny percentage of people who die in plane crashes and use them as "evidence" that planes are deathtraps and that airlines have become disgustingly lax in their maintenance - and it might even seem like a persuasive argument, if you don't know about all the people who fly every year and don't die. Given the hundreds of thousands of applications for stupid crap that get filed, it's more or less inevitable that at least a few of them will slip through. Obviously the goal should be for an error rate of zero, but that's probably not really attainable.
Where it went really wrong is when some moron in the PTO decided that the proper metric for measuring the efficiency of appraisers was to look at how many patents they *grant*. What exactly do you think is going to happen? Yep, any border case that can't be negatively resolved in 5 minutes of patent search gets approved.
I work for the patent office.
The efficiency metrics that the PTO uses to evaluate Examiners boils down to 1) how many applications they process (regardless of whether they are allowed or rejected) and 2) what percentage of their allowances and/or rejections are mistakes, with a "mistake" being either improperly rejecting or improperly allowing a patent.
In short, your assertion that "the PTO decided that the proper metric for measuring the efficiency of appraisers was to look at how many patents they *grant*" is total bullshit.
For the billionth time: the patent title is not what the patent covers. You'll fine a ton of patents for new types of car engines titled "engine for an automobile" or something similar. It doesn't mean that all you need to reject them is prior art showing any sort of automobile engine - you have to find their specific invention, as disclosed in the claims.
The patent's priority date is April 22, 1996. Starcraft was about three years late. There might very well have been examples of prior art from 1996 or earlier that should have invalidated this, but off the top of my head I can't think of any. All of the "prior art" that people are listing throughout this discussion are much too new. Everyone is just looking at the 2002 patent issue date, but in fact the original 1996 application date is the important thing.
Your earlier machine would render the newer machine+seat invention obvious, and the machine+seat patent application would be rejected (assuming your teleportation machine worked the same).
Patents are only enforceable in the country in which they are filed. The language doesn't matter. You are complaining about a problem that does not exist.
Slashdot Mirror
So if two companies set out to solve a problem and eventually develop the same solution after each investing thousands of man-hours and millions of dollars in R&D, you think that means the invention was obvious? Really?
The difference is that Oregon's constitution says "expression" rather than "speech." One could reasonably argue that getting naked doesn't qualify as "speech," but it's much harder to argue that it's not a form of expression.
When you submit a paper, it goes on record as having been considered in the examination process. The examiner might or might not follow up on citations in a submitted paper, but those citations aren't automatically recorded as having been considered; which is why you don't have to submit full copies of them.
I am a patent examiner, and your understanding is wrong. Applicants must submit complete copies of journal articles if they want the article considered. Also, they don't *have* to explain how your invention is different, although it might be a good idea to do so.
You might be "+5 Insightful," but you're also wrong. Inventors have a 1-year window after publishing in which they can file their application. This is true under both the old laws and the new. I love how the people with mod points don't let a little thing like not knowing anything about patent law get in the way of their pronouncing a post that (incorrectly) tries to explain a point of patent law as "insightful."
Okay, name some prior art examples of this patent's claim 1. We'll wait...
Really? You think there are sites already doing this?
Claim 1 is:1. A method for representing ownership of an asset in a social network environment, the method comprising: receiving a request from a first user of the social network environment to purchase the asset for a second user; recording information about a purchase of the asset from a vendor; associating, by a server for the social networking environment, the purchased asset with a profile of the second user; sending for display to a viewing user an association between the purchased asset and the second user on a feed display page; sending for display to the viewing user, in connection with the association between the purchased asset and the second user, information indicating that a third user, with whom the viewing user has established a connection in the social network, owns the asset, and information including a name of the first user who gave the asset to the second user, on the feed display page.
So please, by all means tell me what sites are already doing this. Since you think there are lots of sites already doing this, it should be quite easy for you to list a few. I can't wait...
No, it's not. Slashdot's mod up/down system would only be relevant prior art if it was able to automatically rate new comments by analyzing the ratings of similar previous comments. But I love how it's impossible for there to be a patent story on slashdot without a hoard of people shouting "prior art! prior art!" about irrelevant bullshit because they haven't actually read the patent...
Only if slashdot's moderation system automatically detected and censored new posts that were very similar to previous posts that had been moded down.
Oh, you DID actually read the patent, right?
The summary of the patent does not actually describe what the patent is about. I know, it's shocking to think that such a thing could happen on slashdot.
Claim 1 is: 1. A computer-implemented method of approving a document, the method comprising: analyzing content of a first document to identify one or more first portions, wherein the first portions are visual, textual, or audio portions; identifying one or more second documents that are similar to the first document, wherein the one or more second documents have second portions that are visual, textual, or audio portions; based upon computer code that describes the first portions and the second portions, determining whether any of the first portions are substantially identical to the second portions that have been predetermined to be unacceptable; and approving the first document only if none of the first portions are substantially identical to the second portions that have been predetermined to be unacceptable.
But let's not do anything crazy like actually reading the patent before we start discussing it...
I do NOT see how this would help the backlog. It's not going to speed up the examination process any. And under a first-to-file system, companies are encouraged to file an application for every tiny little incremental improvement, rather than a single application at the end of their R&D cycle. It will probably greatly increase the number of applications.
The bargain inherent in the patent system is that you get patent protection in exchange for teaching your idea to the world. If you invent something but keep it secret, you haven't fulfilled your part of the bargain and you don't deserve anything, because you haven't actually benefited society yet. It makes sense that the patent system would reward the first person to actually teach their invention to the world, rather than rewarding someone who invented something and then sat quietly on it.
The PTO has about a 25% allowance rate, so assuming IBM's applications are "average," they would have to file about 20000 applications to get those 5000 patents. Of course, they might have a strategy of filing tons of very narrow (and so easy to get) applications rather than fewer broader (and so harder to get) applications.
Software or an algorithm AREN'T patentable. If you submit a patent application for some software code or an algorithm per se it will be immediately rejected as non-patentable subject matter.
Computer code is not patentable. If you actually read a "software patent," you'll see that they claim something along the lines of "A computer-based method for doing X, comprising using a computer to calculate A, B, and C, running operation Y on values A, B and C, then doing Z." If you try to file an application for "a computer program for doing X, comprising..." it will be swiftly rejected as not patentable subject matter.
1) As I recall, there are procedures to amend a rejected application or to appeal a rejection. If those procedures are routinely exercised and the submissions are not considered new applications, then the total processing time of an approved patent will be significantly shorter than that of a rejected one. This gives a strong incentive to grant a patent over rejecting it.
Examiners receive work credit for examining amended applications or applications in which the applicant has requested a continued examination after a final rejection has been issued. It is actually much more work to allow a patent than to reject it, since as soon as your find prior art that reads on an application, you're done and you can move on to the next one. If you don't find prior art, on the other hand, it means you'll have to spend a LOT of time carefully reviewing anything and everything that might be relevant, or run the risk of getting nailed by Quality Assurance later on.
2) When does a patent application get reviewed for being improperly rejected or improperly allowed? If an improper rejection review can triggered by a submitter''s complaint but an improper allowance only comes to light after competitors sue over the patent, it gives another strong incentive to grant a patent over rejecting it.
An examiner's work is regularly reviewed by the "quality assurance" people, a sinister and mysterious group that pulls a sampling of recent work and scrutinizes it. Anything that an examiner allows is much more likely to be reviewed, and will generally be reviewed in much more detail, than something that they reject. The "safe" way for an examiner to slack off without too much risk of getting into trouble is to slap together bullshit obviousness rejections, since the quality assurance people focus so much on anything that gets allowed and not so much on things that get rejected. To balance out the incentives that the Quality Assurance people might give an examiner to just reject everything, applicants have various options for appealing rejections that they feel are improper.
I prefer to treat it as "not bullshit" until you address my points above.
He said that the PTO uses allowed applications as the metric for efficiency. That is most certainly bullshit, regardless of any of the points that you raised.
The law says that a patent can't be granted on an invention that would be obvious to one of ORDINARY skill in the art. Something might be obvious to a person of extraordinary intelligence, skill, and experience, but that doesn't mean it's not patentable.
As for something being obvious just because it was developed nearly-simultaneously, you ignore the fact that competing companies often invest vast amounts of money and manpower into researching the same problem, only to come to about the same solution. I wouldn't say that an invention was obvious just because two different entities independently invented it if both entities had to invest millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours into the research.
I would argue that independent invention without exposure to the other's work should simply invalidate the patent right off the bat. If two people are filing a patent on the same invention, unless they were working together at some point in the past or one of them stole research from the other in some way, that means the patent covers something that is obvious to a practitioner in the field, and is not patentable in the first place.
What a ridiculous assertion. If two companies each set out to solve a problem, and after each investing millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man-hours into the research eventually come up with very similar solutions, you think that means the solution was "obvious"?
That patent was filed in 1993. Do you know of a published reference teaching the patent's claims from BEFORE the patent was filed? Laser pointers weren't so cheap and plentiful back then...
Hello,
I work for the patent office. It's actually very hard to get a patent. As a general rule, application examiners with the PTO try hard to reject everything, and they usually succeed. But there are something like 700,000 patent applications filed each year, and much of them are for stupid obvious crap. Even if 99.99% of the crap is caught and rejected, that still means that every year dozens of stupid thing will slip through the cracks and get issued, and people on slashdot will point to that tiny number of mistakes as proof that the PTO isn't doing it's job.
And that's fair enough, because if ANY patents that shouldn't be issued get issued, it means we screwed up. But you're utterly wrong in your assertion that "It has become disgustingly easy to patent something that really should not be patentable." Sure, if you file tens of thousands of applications for stupid obvious crap, then you might have a few of them slip through; but that's hardly an "easy" way to get a patent. Using your logic, I could point at the tiny percentage of people who die in plane crashes and use them as "evidence" that planes are deathtraps and that airlines have become disgustingly lax in their maintenance - and it might even seem like a persuasive argument, if you don't know about all the people who fly every year and don't die. Given the hundreds of thousands of applications for stupid crap that get filed, it's more or less inevitable that at least a few of them will slip through. Obviously the goal should be for an error rate of zero, but that's probably not really attainable.
Where it went really wrong is when some moron in the PTO decided that the proper metric for measuring the efficiency of appraisers was to look at how many patents they *grant*. What exactly do you think is going to happen? Yep, any border case that can't be negatively resolved in 5 minutes of patent search gets approved.
I work for the patent office.
The efficiency metrics that the PTO uses to evaluate Examiners boils down to 1) how many applications they process (regardless of whether they are allowed or rejected) and 2) what percentage of their allowances and/or rejections are mistakes, with a "mistake" being either improperly rejecting or improperly allowing a patent.
In short, your assertion that "the PTO decided that the proper metric for measuring the efficiency of appraisers was to look at how many patents they *grant*" is total bullshit.
For the billionth time: the patent title is not what the patent covers. You'll fine a ton of patents for new types of car engines titled "engine for an automobile" or something similar. It doesn't mean that all you need to reject them is prior art showing any sort of automobile engine - you have to find their specific invention, as disclosed in the claims.
The patent's priority date is April 22, 1996. Starcraft was about three years late. There might very well have been examples of prior art from 1996 or earlier that should have invalidated this, but off the top of my head I can't think of any. All of the "prior art" that people are listing throughout this discussion are much too new. Everyone is just looking at the 2002 patent issue date, but in fact the original 1996 application date is the important thing.
Your earlier machine would render the newer machine+seat invention obvious, and the machine+seat patent application would be rejected (assuming your teleportation machine worked the same).
Patents are only enforceable in the country in which they are filed. The language doesn't matter. You are complaining about a problem that does not exist.