The USPTO has computers powered by slugs on horse tranquilizers. They issue patents left, right, and center, but they can’t manage to keep track of them well enough to answer a simple goddamned question.
Why is that? Well, like many things egregiously broken about our country, it’s all down to those fucktarts in Congress. They keep popping up everywhere, fucking people every time. They don’t fund the USPTO enough for it to do its job, so it has become so disorganized its computer systems cannot handle a simple database query. Maybe this is related to Don’t Ask-Don’t Tell, but they’re not saying.
Why is this troubling? It’s symptomatic of a much larger problem. One of the biggest sanity checks applied to new patent applications is whether someone has already patented it. Since the number of patents issued every year is enormous, no human could possibly look through all of them to find the needle in the haystack that pops the current application. Thus they need kickass database technology. Their lack of basic database technology makes me question their ability to do anything worthwhile whatsoever.
We have relational databases. We’ve had them for decades now. We have SQL, and have for a good long time. It isn’t supposed to matter that the USPTO generates 1 million patents in five years, because databases are meant to grow to gigantic sizes without becoming unmanagable. We have invested a lot of time to make that possible.
Apparently, none of that technology reached the USPTO.
Ironic, really: The country which grants patents for anything under the sun (including computer programmes and databases), in order to supposedly encourage progress, finds itself light years behind the rest of the world who don’t grant such monopolies willy-nilly. Whodathunkit?
Not to rain on your parade, but if the system can do a proper patent search, I don’t really give a shit if it can’t answer some trivia question from a hard hitting USA Today reporter.
I don’t know the specifics of the USPTO’s databases but to say that any database and server is scalable is a false one. Very often “scaling” is nothing more than adding disk space without adding processor capacity. This, combined with a database design that may not have been all that good to begin with and neglect of basic tasks such as index and statistics regeneration can result in the problem you’ve seen.
FWIW I work for a company that makes massively parallel database systems. The architecture allows the system to expand by adding CPUs to keep processing power in a constasnt proportion to storage. Scaling can be virtually unlimited with no drop in performance but even this can be poorly setup so even a small database is slow.
I worked for the Patent and Trademark Office while in college, and the office downstairs had the only working version of a particular Xerox copier left in the world. It wasn’t on display - they actually used the damn thing!
It was impossible to get parts for, was ungainly and huge - just a complete mess. Still, the micro-fiche that they used to make certified copies of patents could only be copied on this one copier.
Let’s see…the way I figure it (carry the 3), if Congress gave the Patent Office the amount of money we are spending in Iraq in (times 9, minus the square) 12 minutes, they could completely revamp their database, hire a dozen techs to do the work, and be back in the 21st century by 2007.
You know what? Congress doesn’t give the PTO a red cent. Congress takes money paid by inventors for patent examination, and uses it to build bridges to nowhere. It’s a crime.
Actually patents are pretty widespread across the world. The UK has a patent office, Canada has a patent office, there’s a European patent organisation.
And last I checked the world’s eminent military and economic power, the first nation to land men on the moon and one of the few nations with manned space flight, isn’t “light years behind the rest of the world.”
What exactly were you talking about, anyways? Because I have a sick suspicion you don’t even know.
By the way, to answer the OPs question click here .
Thank you for informing me that the UK has a patent office, and about the EPO in Munich. You have made my commute to work far easier.
The OP bemoans that the database technology in the USPO is far behind eg. Epoque. The irony I noted is that the US routinely grants patents for databases and computer programmes which the rest of the world consider trivial and exclude from patentablility. I hope I have allayed your paranoid mental illness.
Things that are trivial to someone in the field might never occur to anyone who is not in the field. This is probably true of all fields, but since I happen to know so much about programming it’s those examples that rankle the worst. This is why a patent office, any patent office, needs to have people versed in every field for which it will patent inventions, to weed out bogus patent applications.
The Anatomy of a Trivial Software Patent, where the kind of patent that makes developers livid is taken apart claim by claim and proven to be utterly, abysmally trivial.
No, we’re correctly managed, not bureaucratic, and fully funded through our fees. In fact, we’re overfunded through our fees but Congress won’t let us have the excess to make improvements. Their reasoning is that we’re not doing enough with what we have but we can’t do more because what we have is bogged down, as Derleth said.
This is the first time in years that we’re expanding our examining ranks, a job which has one of the highest turnover rates for white-collar workers in the entire country.
Shit, I wonder why. Could it be the fact patents are written in the vaguest, broadest, least-English-like legalese imaginable? This is another thing that absolutely gets me: The yahoos who file patents want their patent to encompass the world, so they write it in the most convoluted way possible, aiming to almost completely stifle any attempt to comprehend it. This has the knock-on effect, not entirely unintentional I’m sure, of making the task of searching for patents extremely difficult, which makes the task of finding relevant prior art just about impossible.
In my perfect world, all patents not written in plain English would be rejected out of hand.