How massively underfunded is the US Patent & Trademark Office? Let me count the ways.

[Voyager]

@Lute Skywatcher

As Derleth said, it’s symptomatic of a much larger problem.

-Lute Skywatcher, friendly neighborhood USPTO employee.

I can believe it. I got two patents 15 years ago, and people in my group got a bunch more. There was always a response from the examiner with prior work which we had to respond to. (In one case the prior work was by another person on my group - our patent attorney had a good time with that one. ) The prior work found was always fairly reasonable, definitely so for someone not a specialist in our subfield.

I just got two patents recently. Neither one got any response from the examiner. It’s like they are not trying anymore, which I can understand if you are funded by applications. My impression is that the USPTO must maximize the flow of patents to keep up the revenue stream. But I wasn’t aware you had to turn money back! That sucks.

[Skywatcher]

USPTO FY 2006 Fee Schedule

[Skywatcher]

@Voyager

But I wasn’t aware you had to turn money back! That sucks.

And how! About 5 years ago, we became a Federal Corporation, similar to Amtrak and the Tennessee Valley Authority. At the time, I was under the impression that we would no longer have to rely on Congress for funding. We didn’t get away that easily.

[Squink]

@Lute Skywatcher

USPTO FY 2006 Fee Schedule

---->“Fastener Quality Act Fees”
Does this translate to “Pay us money, or we use the cheap staples”?

[Skywatcher]

@Squink

---->“Fastener Quality Act Fees”
Does this translate to “Pay us money, or we use the cheap staples”?

Hee.

Frankly, I have no idea. I’m administration.

[ataraxy22]

@Derleth

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.

Having just spent this past week in a class preparing for the Patent Bar, I feel somewhat qualified to respond to this.

The reason why the language in the claims is written the way it is, is to make sure that the patent practitioner’s clients receive patent protection for every bit of the intellectual property metaspace that they are entitled to. To do otherwise could be construed as negligence on the part of the patent practitioner and could even leave them open to being sued by their clients for malpractice.

Further, a lot of inventions are, almost by definition, difficult or impossible to describe precisely using conscise language.

[Cerri]

I realize this is almost off-topic at this point, but if you’re still really interested in that list, Jude Reter of ipIQ sent the reporter that list. According to the blurb, Reter said his company was able to make the list in about an hour.

USATODAY.com - Pop Candy (scroll down to TA DA! The top inventors list is here! )

It didn’t take long. I published my column Wednesday saying no list of the top 10 living U.S. patent holders existed. Thursday, two companies and one university wrote to say they’d be able to generate such a list sometime soon.

Today, Jude Reter of ipIQ sent me the list. The company says it was able to generate it in about an hour.

So here, then, is the list. The top two are the same people I identified in my column, but I never would’ve been able to find the others. One surprise: an Australian at No. 3. In the US Patent Office’s 1997 study, I didn’t see any Australians in the top 100.

(You’ll have to look at the link for the actual list, I didn’t think I should copy/paste the entire blog entry.)

[Musicat]

@Derleth

Well, fuck that. The situation is even worse than I thought. The fucktarts strike again.

Fucktarts – weren’t they patented back in 1976?

Tha acoustic ones, not the electric ones.

[Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party]

@Derleth

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.

Sorry, I read SentientMeat’s post to mean that all computer programmers were trivial. A misunderstanding on my part.

[Derleth]

@Dominic Mulligan

Sorry, I read SentientMeat’s post to mean that all computer programmers were trivial. A misunderstanding on my part.

I am not trivial!

Second, I oppose all patents on software, not just the trivial junk patents that are issued because the patent offices are too overworked, incompetent, or both to know any better. I oppose them because the entire software industry has always been predicated on free innovation (real innovation, that is, not ‘Innovation’ defined as ‘Microsoft stealing anything not nailed down’) and the free sharing of ideas. Every OS in wide usage now would have been strangled in the cradle had software patents been used as they are now 20-30 years ago. Same with 99.9% of all applications.

[alaricthegoth]

@Lute Skywatcher

And how! About 5 years ago, we became a Federal Corporation, similar to Amtrak and the Tennessee Valley Authority. At the time, I was under the impression that we would no longer have to rely on Congress for funding. We didn’t get away that easily.

how can system with the goal of encouraging innovation via commercial exploitation consider itself performing adequately when it fucks off 2 and 1/2 years of exploitation time while the application rises to the top of the work stack?