The Real Problem With the US Patent System

Pachooka-san writes "An article in the Washington Post touches on the 'real' patent problem — the quotas that Patent Examiners must meet. They have no effective quality standards, only production standards, so many applications get only cursory review just so the PE can keep up the grueling pace. The USPTO is the only government agency that can and does lay you off if your productivity drops below 85% of the standard for your civil service grade. A Primary PE has to process 5 new and 5 old applications every 2 weeks (that's 8 hours each, folks). The best part — that 28-box application mentioned in the article? — it gets the PE the same credit as the smallest application. How many of those 28 boxes do you think even got opened?"

Re:Patents are very difficult to read

[dmeranda]

No, patents are quite different from most forms of legalise. They are definitely designed to be as incomprehensible as possible and as ambiguous as possible. Wheras most legalise is an attempt to be precise (much like computer programming), "patentese" is the other extreme to be as imprecise as you can possibly get by with.

For comparison go read "real" legalize, say almost any of the Public Laws passed by congress. Some of them may be long (mainly those intended to obfuscate the flow of bribery money, er, earmarks). But the laws that are actually suppposed to be the most legal in terms of setting rules for citizens, they are surprising very easy to read and understand in English. In fact the more important the law, usually the easier it is to understand. Look at some of the constitutional ammendments. Most are only a paragraph or two of very plain English prose. See, the congress which wrote those wanted to be sure they were so clear that nobody could ever not understand them or misinterpret them.

On the other hand, patent lawers and the companies they front actually desire to create as much confusion and obfuscation as possible. Ever wonder why ordinary lawers can do pretty much anything, except patent law?

The sad thing is that the original intent of a patent was to actually make knowledge more available and understandable to the public as a whole. But instead patents are written in some invented cryptographic foreign language; plus the way legal penalties are set up it's in your best interest to actually NOT read patents, so the legal system is actively discouraging the disemination of knowledge, the same way a traffic ticket discourages speeding....the exact opposite of the purpose of patents.

Re:You get what you pay for...

[pilgrim23]

Indeed. After all a Patent on your idea is absolutely VITAL to maintaining your market....NOT!!
See how Coca-Cola protected their formula.

Bureaucrats and lawyers...a winning combination...for bureaucrats and lawyers.

The system needs rethinking

[Cracked Pottery]

The purpose of patents in the Constitution is the promotion of innovation. This is original law. It is clear that in many cases patents are used merely to suppress competition by capable competitors. I think software and drug patents are especially illustrative. The rate of invention is much faster than the periods for patents warrant.

We have, largely at public expense, mapped the human genome. Many drugs are patented that were developed at public expense and licensed to drug companies to be sold for whatever they can get. Scientists are not going to stop being interested in biochemistry because they are less likely to become billionaires.

Too many software patents are trivial. Every now and then somebody comes up with an algorithm that is groundbreaking. IBM, as a joke, patented an algorithm for assigning access to restrooms on a train. Don't even get me started on "business method" patents.

Re:WTF?

[Dunbal]

Funny, you were modded Flamebait by an official Republican fanboy.

Also funny how, despite your qote that mentions "technological progress", this government slashed the science budget by over $100 million. Guess they needed to pay for a few extra Humvees.

But that's ok. China is coming, and God are they going to run right over the US economy. TWO billion people. I hope they will be nice to us.

"First we feared the wolf, then we danced with the wolf. Now we want to BE the wolf" - A chinese politician.

Re:Patents are very difficult to read

[MobyDisk]

They aren't written in normal legaleze. I worked at a company that submitted a patent for a device I helped design and build. We submitted technical documentation, and the company lawyers turned that into a patent document. When I reviewed the patent, I would have had no idea that the patent was describing what I worked on, had they not told me so ahead of time. I'm not joking. What was about 20 pages of documentation of a concept, including illustrations, became hundreds of pages of completely confusing information. Where a single technical term was the precise meaning of something, it would be replaced with entire paragraphs explaining that concept in a way that no engineer would understand it.

Patents are technical documents. They are supposed to describe a solution to a problem in a way that a technician with adequate knowledge can understand the concept and verify that it is not already in use, and that a future product does not infringe upon it. If the designer of the system does not even recognize the patent, then it is not able to do that.

You are correct when you say that legalize has very precise meaning. But patents are intended to be as broad as possible, so the lawyers do what they can do take a single concept and make it as vague as possible. So words that have precise meanings in the original technical document are replaced with vague meanings (hence how single terms become entire paragraphs). I actually saw sentences that spanned whole pages, and paragraph separators were used to indicate that this "word" had been explained inline.

For example:
The ruler must be 12 inches long.

Becomes:
The [entire paragraph explaining what a physical object with measurements might look like, in every possible way you could imagine, regardless of shape, size, or material, without requiring graduation marks or whatever],

must be [complex explanation indicating that some unspecified minimum dimensions may or may not be required].

Not all patents are written this way, but many of them are.

Not really flamebait.

[Original Replica]

The previous post is questioning why the patent system is "critical to the nation's health." I think it's a fair question, not flamebait. As with many things the answer is not a clear yes or no. Here at Slashdot there are frequent observations about how parts of the current patent system stifle innovation and progress. Of course with no patent system at all the R&D budgets would vanish in almost every field. But what percentage of patents are actual "innovation [and] technological progress"? Is a "Method of creating an anti-gravity illusion" (patent #5255452) really innovation or just a neat trick? Is it critical to our nation's health? How about patent 4773863, an "Amusement Device for a Toilet Bowl"? Critical or superfluous? What about those extra vague idea patents? Perhaps there should be an additional pre-filter for the patent system where things are quickly reviewed and voted as either an important innovation, or a non-critical neat idea. Non-critical neat ideas (for which even something as big as the iPod would qualify) may well be deserving of some short term protection, but the long term protection of every mildly original thought has lead us to a patent logjam that hurts our nation's economic health.

Comparison - other worldwide offices ?

[udippel]

I left the European Patent Office 10 years ago (blablabla) ... ... and in those days we had around 2 days per application.

It would be good to compare with the current required production numbers of the Japanese, Korean etc. offices before drawing conclusions.
Anyone in here ? EPO anyone ? (I recently read the EPO was similarly down to around 1 day ?)

In those days .. blablabla .. it was not dismissal that threatened us. It was the other end: promotion depended on high production. Quality was almost no concern. Though, honestly, our quality then (at least) was one class above the USPTO. No, not because I happened to be one of the 2000 examiners, rather to the contrary.