EFF’s Stupid Patent of the Month shows how patent reviews stop dumb patents

A patent litigation factory was stopped from suing hundreds of small printers.

Read the whole story

 

[Veritas super omens]

Patent system is broken, and probably beyond fixing. Result? Lawyers win, you lose.

 

[Nowicki]

 

[rountad]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

 

[Akemi]

Patent system is broken, and probably beyond fixing. Result? Lawyers win, you lose.

And it will continue to be so long as the office is largely funded by the review process rather than getting it right to begin with. One of the biggest overhauls should come in the form of a public 60-90 day review period for pending patents. How many times have you seen a patent suit where right here in the comments section you see tons of linked prior art that suggest the patent should never have been granted?

 

[Wonder Chemist]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

3) If i run away from the patent application at the speed of light I should observe photons emitted from the patent at rest though spatially oscillating...

 

[melgross]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

Yeah, if 1 was obvious, it would happen, but too often, it’s not only not obvious, but totally unknown, so the patent goes through.

There’s really nothing wrong with stupid patents. I’ve seen plenty of those over the years. But stupid patent almost always means valid patents that patent something stupid that no one will ever want to do, so no one cares.

Stupidly patenting something that shouldn’t be allowed to be patented is something else.

 

[anonymouschicken]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

Relevant:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/pow ... 0152831208

 

[A.Felix]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

Yeah, if 1 was obvious, it would happen, but too often, it’s not only not obvious, but totally unknown, so the patent goes through.

There’s really nothing wrong with stupid patents. I’ve seen plenty of those over the years. But stupid patent almost always means valid patents that patent something stupid that no one will ever want to do, so no one cares.

Stupidly patenting something that shouldn’t be allowed to be patented is something else.

Well, the problem with #1 is who is the one judging if it is obvious or not. Some patent office clerk at the turn of the millennium may not see some network printing tech as obvious, while someone who works with networks would throw the application away wondering why someone wanted to patent something so stupidly obvious, like the sharing of resources in the network, which is what networks are for. On the other hand someone can come up with some patent that I would read and think "this is some breakthrough shit" only to have a person well versed in the subject come up and tell me I'm an idiot for allowing that to be patented when there's prior art going back to when token ring networks were still a thing.

 

[melgross]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

Yeah, if 1 was obvious, it would happen, but too often, it’s not only not obvious, but totally unknown, so the patent goes through.

There’s really nothing wrong with stupid patents. I’ve seen plenty of those over the years. But stupid patent almost always means valid patents that patent something stupid that no one will ever want to do, so no one cares.

Stupidly patenting something that shouldn’t be allowed to be patented is something else.

Well, the problem with #1 is who is the one judging if it is obvious or not. Some patent office clerk at the turn of the millennium may not see some network printing tech as obvious, while someone who works with networks would throw the application away wondering why someone wanted to patent something so stupidly obvious, like the sharing of resources in the network, which is what networks are for. On the other hand someone can come up with some patent that I would read and think "this is some breakthrough shit" only to have a person well versed in the subject come up and tell me I'm an idiot for allowing that to be patented when there's prior art going back to when token ring networks were still a thing.

Office clerks do the same everywhere, they file things and retrieve them. Office clerks don’t make any of these decisions, as you should well know. Patent examiners make them. They are experts in the field they examine. But there are so many patents out there, and so much work being done, with hundreds of papers in many different journals filed every year in every area, that it’s impossible to keep up.

You can’t properly blame the examiners. Every one of us makes mistakes. Anyone who claims otherwise is either naive or narcissistic.

To understand the concepts of patents, you need to understand that it’s not what the patent claim is about, it’s how the claim does it. You can have 10 valid patents on ways of sharing resources over a network. There’s no exclusivity in many things.

You can take a valid patent and add to it in a way that makes possible something that the original patent can’t do, and patent the combination as a new patent.

The patent system is versatile. But errors creep in. Modern technology is extraordinary complex. Some patents take dozens of pages to explain.

 

[mjeffer]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

Yeah, if 1 was obvious, it would happen, but too often, it’s not only not obvious, but totally unknown, so the patent goes through.

There’s really nothing wrong with stupid patents. I’ve seen plenty of those over the years. But stupid patent almost always means valid patents that patent something stupid that no one will ever want to do, so no one cares.

Stupidly patenting something that shouldn’t be allowed to be patented is something else.

Well, the problem with #1 is who is the one judging if it is obvious or not. Some patent office clerk at the turn of the millennium may not see some network printing tech as obvious, while someone who works with networks would throw the application away wondering why someone wanted to patent something so stupidly obvious, like the sharing of resources in the network, which is what networks are for. On the other hand someone can come up with some patent that I would read and think "this is some breakthrough shit" only to have a person well versed in the subject come up and tell me I'm an idiot for allowing that to be patented when there's prior art going back to when token ring networks were still a thing.

Office clerks do the same everywhere, they file things and retrieve them. Office clerks don’t make any of these decisions, as you should well know. Patent examiners make them. They are experts in the field they examine. But there are so many patents out there, and so much work being done, with hundreds of papers in many different journals filed every year in every area, that it’s impossible to keep up.

You can’t properly blame the examiners. Every one of us makes mistakes. Anyone who claims otherwise is either naive or narcissistic.

To understand the concepts of patents, you need to understand that it’s not what the patent claim is about, it’s how the claim does it. You can have 10 valid patents on ways of sharing resources over a network. There’s no exclusivity in many things.

You can take a valid patent and add to it in a way that makes possible something that the original patent can’t do, and patent the combination as a new patent.

The patent system is versatile. But errors creep in. Modern technology is extraordinary complex. Some patents take dozens of pages to explain.

He's actually right on the clerk part. Patent examiners are often called patent clerks. He was referring to them as clerks who work at the patent office. Not actual office clerks.

 

[Oldmanalex]

After a patent case, I was chatting with one of the attorneys, and he said after 5 years of software patents, how much he like doing pharmaceutical patents, because at least here there was something tangible to argue over. In his view a lot of software patents consisted of taking old work, and running it through a thesaurus, to find obscure synonyms, which would avoid the USPTO's filters. Nothing on connectivity through a triple laminate of concentric cylinders made from two different plastics interspersed between a woven cuprous outer sheaf, and an inner extended tubular element with a very small valence band gap and a veritable Atlantic Ocean of electrons surfing the rf frequency swells artificially induced in the Fermi sea. Looks like a great improvement in doing it over Coax.

 

[anonymouschicken]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

Yeah, if 1 was obvious, it would happen, but too often, it’s not only not obvious, but totally unknown, so the patent goes through.

There’s really nothing wrong with stupid patents. I’ve seen plenty of those over the years. But stupid patent almost always means valid patents that patent something stupid that no one will ever want to do, so no one cares.

Stupidly patenting something that shouldn’t be allowed to be patented is something else.

Well, the problem with #1 is who is the one judging if it is obvious or not. Some patent office clerk at the turn of the millennium may not see some network printing tech as obvious, while someone who works with networks would throw the application away wondering why someone wanted to patent something so stupidly obvious, like the sharing of resources in the network, which is what networks are for. On the other hand someone can come up with some patent that I would read and think "this is some breakthrough shit" only to have a person well versed in the subject come up and tell me I'm an idiot for allowing that to be patented when there's prior art going back to when token ring networks were still a thing.

Office clerks do the same everywhere, they file things and retrieve them. Office clerks don’t make any of these decisions, as you should well know. Patent examiners make them. They are experts in the field they examine. But there are so many patents out there, and so much work being done, with hundreds of papers in many different journals filed every year in every area, that it’s impossible to keep up.

You can’t properly blame the examiners. Every one of us makes mistakes. Anyone who claims otherwise is either naive or narcissistic.

To understand the concepts of patents, you need to understand that it’s not what the patent claim is about, it’s how the claim does it. You can have 10 valid patents on ways of sharing resources over a network. There’s no exclusivity in many things.

You can take a valid patent and add to it in a way that makes possible something that the original patent can’t do, and patent the combination as a new patent.

The patent system is versatile. But errors creep in. Modern technology is extraordinary complex. Some patents take dozens of pages to explain.

Exactly. People tend not to realize that the only thing in a patent that really matters is the broadest claim, in which every single word limits the scope of the patent. When it comes to articles like this, simply reproducing the patent's title will often give the impression that a patent is far broader or more abstract than it actually is, which leads to misconceptions about the scope of the problem. Patent trolls frequently have terrible patents, if you actually read the words of the claim. Most patent troll lawsuits have little if any merit. The patent trolls aren't expecting to go to court and win - rather they're counting on the defendant not wanting to deal with the hassle of litigation and opting instead to pay a settlement or license fee.

People seem to think that at least some patent examiners simply rubber stamp every patent application that comes across their desk. In reality, almost all patent applications are initially rejected by the patent office. It's practically a matter of course for patent examiners to reject an application the first time they see it. Most patents are only allowed after a multi-year back-and-forth between the patent office and patent lawyer, during which the patent lawyer will add language to the claims to significantly narrow the scope of the patent until they arrive at something the examiner is comfortable with. A patent with the title "Networking System" might end up with a broadest claim that fills an entire page, and which no one could infringe even if they tried.

Now, that's not saying that every patent that gets issued is perfect. At the end of the day, patent examiners are people who have to trawl through massive databases looking for prior art that may or may not exist. Their searches are only as good as the keywords they come up with, and sometimes prior art gets missed. While they have to meet certain technical qualifications to review patents in their field, they may or may not put in the effort to keep up with the state of the art. Fortunately we have the IPR system to catch patents with prior art problems, even in the absence of rock-solid guidance on the section 101 issues that often come up when we talk about software patents.

 

[MatthewSleeman]

I hate to be defending a patent troll, but shouldn't Good Faith rules protect CTP?

 

[Wolvenmoon]

Patent system is broken, and probably beyond fixing. Result? Lawyers win, you lose.

And it will continue to be so long as the office is largely funded by the review process rather than getting it right to begin with. One of the biggest overhauls should come in the form of a public 60-90 day review period for pending patents. How many times have you seen a patent suit where right here in the comments section you see tons of linked prior art that suggest the patent should never have been granted?

I think that patents should require a product either be in active research and development or active production by the patent holder, or be forfeited to the public domain after a decade of disuse. Of course exceptions would be made if the company could demonstrate significant investments into a supply or production chain for something, demonstrate that there was only periodic demand for said something I.E. a patented method for deploying living quarters on the moon, etc.

Point being: Produce it or lose it.

 

[Veritas super omens]

I am not an inventor or patent examiner but MANY of the patents discussed in these articles seem obvious TO ME.

 

[Matthew J.]

When this sort of thing happens, the offending company should be forced to disgorge any settlements it unlawfully collected.

The money shouldn't go back to the companies who settled (screw them for feeding the trolls), but should instead go to the patent office, and be earmarked for prior art searches.

 

[nizmo_man]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

Reminds me of the Bruce Almighty scene, where the prayers come via email, and Bruce hits 'yes' to all.

 

[Fuzzy_Bear]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

3) If i run away from the patent application at the speed of light I should observe photons emitted from the patent at rest though spatially oscillating...

It must be a very special patent if it is emitting photons.

 

[raxadian]

I think remote printing is quite old. In fact isn't what Fax basically is? And Fax also uses a communication network, phone landlines.

So yeah, is amazing how easy is to get patents in the good old US.

 

[Derecho Imminent]

Wouldnt having the patent office hire people smart enough to not approve stupid patents in the first place be even cheaper than IPR's? Or maybe if the guy reviewing the patent application doesnt feel confident to make a good decision it should go straight to something like an IPR before it is approved instead of years later.

 

[slopoke]

Patent system is broken, and probably beyond fixing. Result? Lawyers win, you lose.

And it will continue to be so long as the office is largely funded by the review process rather than getting it right to begin with. One of the biggest overhauls should come in the form of a public 60-90 day review period for pending patents. How many times have you seen a patent suit where right here in the comments section you see tons of linked prior art that suggest the patent should never have been granted?

I think that patents should require a product either be in active research and development or active production by the patent holder, or be forfeited to the public domain after a decade of disuse. Of course exceptions would be made if the company could demonstrate significant investments into a supply or production chain for something, demonstrate that there was only periodic demand for said something I.E. a patented method for deploying living quarters on the moon, etc.

Point being: Produce it or lose it.

A better solution would be restriction on patent selling.

US Constitution:
The Congress shall have power ... To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.

Give me just one example of how selling a patent or copyright "promotes the progress" or how a sold patent or copyright maintains an "exclusive right" for the authors and inventors.

Let the authors and inventors license their patents sure (even an exclusive license) but ownership should remain with the original author or inventor. This 4th hand-me-down troll behavior would be nipped in the bud.

 

[loquacio]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

Yeah, if 1 was obvious, it would happen, but too often, it’s not only not obvious, but totally unknown, so the patent goes through.

There’s really nothing wrong with stupid patents. I’ve seen plenty of those over the years. But stupid patent almost always means valid patents that patent something stupid that no one will ever want to do, so no one cares.

Stupidly patenting something that shouldn’t be allowed to be patented is something else.

Well, the problem with #1 is who is the one judging if it is obvious or not. Some patent office clerk at the turn of the millennium may not see some network printing tech as obvious, while someone who works with networks would throw the application away wondering why someone wanted to patent something so stupidly obvious, like the sharing of resources in the network, which is what networks are for. On the other hand someone can come up with some patent that I would read and think "this is some breakthrough shit" only to have a person well versed in the subject come up and tell me I'm an idiot for allowing that to be patented when there's prior art going back to when token ring networks were still a thing.

Office clerks do the same everywhere, they file things and retrieve them. Office clerks don’t make any of these decisions, as you should well know. Patent examiners make them. They are experts in the field they examine. But there are so many patents out there, and so much work being done, with hundreds of papers in many different journals filed every year in every area, that it’s impossible to keep up.

You can’t properly blame the examiners. Every one of us makes mistakes. Anyone who claims otherwise is either naive or narcissistic.

To understand the concepts of patents, you need to understand that it’s not what the patent claim is about, it’s how the claim does it. You can have 10 valid patents on ways of sharing resources over a network. There’s no exclusivity in many things.

You can take a valid patent and add to it in a way that makes possible something that the original patent can’t do, and patent the combination as a new patent.

The patent system is versatile. But errors creep in. Modern technology is extraordinary complex. Some patents take dozens of pages to explain.

Exactly. People tend not to realize that the only thing in a patent that really matters is the broadest claim, in which every single word limits the scope of the patent. When it comes to articles like this, simply reproducing the patent's title will often give the impression that a patent is far broader or more abstract than it actually is, which leads to misconceptions about the scope of the problem. Patent trolls frequently have terrible patents, if you actually read the words of the claim. Most patent troll lawsuits have little if any merit. The patent trolls aren't expecting to go to court and win - rather they're counting on the defendant not wanting to deal with the hassle of litigation and opting instead to pay a settlement or license fee.

People seem to think that at least some patent examiners simply rubber stamp every patent application that comes across their desk. In reality, almost all patent applications are initially rejected by the patent office. It's practically a matter of course for patent examiners to reject an application the first time they see it. Most patents are only allowed after a multi-year back-and-forth between the patent office and patent lawyer, during which the patent lawyer will add language to the claims to significantly narrow the scope of the patent until they arrive at something the examiner is comfortable with. A patent with the title "Networking System" might end up with a broadest claim that fills an entire page, and which no one could infringe even if they tried.

Now, that's not saying that every patent that gets issued is perfect. At the end of the day, patent examiners are people who have to trawl through massive databases looking for prior art that may or may not exist. Their searches are only as good as the keywords they come up with, and sometimes prior art gets missed. While they have to meet certain technical qualifications to review patents in their field, they may or may not put in the effort to keep up with the state of the art. Fortunately we have the IPR system to catch patents with prior art problems, even in the absence of rock-solid guidance on the section 101 issues that often come up when we talk about software patents.

Automatic initial rejection then approval when sufficient bullshit is added is not a functioning system.

Patent Office doesn't get a free pass because they're "just doing their job" and "it's hard". Their job is a cancer on society. Framing it in legalistic and procedural bullshit doesn't change that.

 

[A.Felix]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

Yeah, if 1 was obvious, it would happen, but too often, it’s not only not obvious, but totally unknown, so the patent goes through.

There’s really nothing wrong with stupid patents. I’ve seen plenty of those over the years. But stupid patent almost always means valid patents that patent something stupid that no one will ever want to do, so no one cares.

Stupidly patenting something that shouldn’t be allowed to be patented is something else.

Well, the problem with #1 is who is the one judging if it is obvious or not. Some patent office clerk at the turn of the millennium may not see some network printing tech as obvious, while someone who works with networks would throw the application away wondering why someone wanted to patent something so stupidly obvious, like the sharing of resources in the network, which is what networks are for. On the other hand someone can come up with some patent that I would read and think "this is some breakthrough shit" only to have a person well versed in the subject come up and tell me I'm an idiot for allowing that to be patented when there's prior art going back to when token ring networks were still a thing.

To understand the concepts of patents, you need to understand that it’s not what the patent claim is about, it’s how the claim does it. You can have 10 valid patents on ways of sharing resources over a network. There’s no exclusivity in many things.

You can take a valid patent and add to it in a way that makes possible something that the original patent can’t do, and patent the combination as a new patent.

The patent system is versatile. But errors creep in. Modern technology is extraordinary complex. Some patents take dozens of pages to explain.

Regular patents, yes, however, the big issue is that this has not applied to software patents. On a non-software patent you register the implementation. You make a lightbulb and the specific filament you used to create light is patented. Anyone else can come up with a different composition for the filament and you get a different patent, or use halogen gas, or LEDs. Software patents tend to be about concepts, like "using electricity to heat up a substance and create light", as opposed to a specific implementation. This is why there are so many patent trolls in software. For example, here's a very famous patent:

A method and system for placing an order to purchase an item via the Internet. The order is placed by a purchaser at a client system and received by a server system. The server system receives purchaser information including identification of the purchaser, payment information, and shipment information from the client system. The server system then assigns a client identifier to the client system and associates the assigned client identifier with the received purchaser information. The server system sends to the client system the assigned client identifier and an HTML document identifying the item and including an order button. The client system receives and stores the assigned client identifier and receives and displays the HTML document. In response to the selection of the order button, the client system sends to the server system a request to purchase the identified item. The server system receives the request and combines the purchaser information associated with the client identifier of the client system to generate an order to purchase the item in accordance with the billing and shipment information whereby the purchaser effects the ordering of the product by selection of the order button.

As you can see, there's no specific information. It patents the damn process of clicking a button and some vague description the backend doing its thing that makes the button work. I could have a completely different way of doing this than Amazon, but look at that patent. You can change a few of words around and make it sound like something else. It is almost describing any button ever that does something that needs some backend processing, with a couple of delimiters that reduce that to any button used to make a purchase online ever. The thing is just saying how client-server systems work, and any developer, even a mediocre one, would've read this and thrown it away, but that didn't happen. This is a completely different beast than what a patent was intended to be, or should be, like. I have mostly no issues with patents over physical stuff, but way too many software ones are just ridiculous.

Also if you think this is a misrepresentation because it's the abstract, take a look at the "specific" claims. They're just as ridiculous and maddening. They literally refer to the process of using your mouse to move a cursor on the screen and click a button on a browser.

 

[supermammal]

Patents just need to be abolished. Nothing is invented in a vacuum.

Typically patents are a race for 1st to file, which means they are un-original and others build off ideas that came before. It's an excuse to be lazy an rest on your laurels because you had an idea. Ideas are a dime a dozen. And if you really did come up with an idea 1st that would usually mean you're 1st to market which is a huge advantage.

But in the end, Patents should die along with Corporations. Corporations used to have limited lifespans, now their considered people who live eternally that prey on people because they bought an idea on paper. Capitalism is a failure and Anarchism obviously works, all you need to do is look towards copyleft and GPL to see what can happen when ideas are shared for the betterment of community.

 

[anonymouschicken]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

Yeah, if 1 was obvious, it would happen, but too often, it’s not only not obvious, but totally unknown, so the patent goes through.

There’s really nothing wrong with stupid patents. I’ve seen plenty of those over the years. But stupid patent almost always means valid patents that patent something stupid that no one will ever want to do, so no one cares.

Stupidly patenting something that shouldn’t be allowed to be patented is something else.

Well, the problem with #1 is who is the one judging if it is obvious or not. Some patent office clerk at the turn of the millennium may not see some network printing tech as obvious, while someone who works with networks would throw the application away wondering why someone wanted to patent something so stupidly obvious, like the sharing of resources in the network, which is what networks are for. On the other hand someone can come up with some patent that I would read and think "this is some breakthrough shit" only to have a person well versed in the subject come up and tell me I'm an idiot for allowing that to be patented when there's prior art going back to when token ring networks were still a thing.

To understand the concepts of patents, you need to understand that it’s not what the patent claim is about, it’s how the claim does it. You can have 10 valid patents on ways of sharing resources over a network. There’s no exclusivity in many things.

You can take a valid patent and add to it in a way that makes possible something that the original patent can’t do, and patent the combination as a new patent.

The patent system is versatile. But errors creep in. Modern technology is extraordinary complex. Some patents take dozens of pages to explain.

Regular patents, yes, however, the big issue is that this has not applied to software patents. On a non-software patent you register the implementation. You make a lightbulb and the specific filament you used to create light is patented. Anyone else can come up with a different composition for the filament and you get a different patent, or use halogen gas, or LEDs. Software patents tend to be about concepts, like "using electricity to heat up a substance and create light", as opposed to a specific implementation. This is why there are so many patent trolls in software. For example, here's a very famous patent:

A method and system for placing an order to purchase an item via the Internet. The order is placed by a purchaser at a client system and received by a server system. The server system receives purchaser information including identification of the purchaser, payment information, and shipment information from the client system. The server system then assigns a client identifier to the client system and associates the assigned client identifier with the received purchaser information. The server system sends to the client system the assigned client identifier and an HTML document identifying the item and including an order button. The client system receives and stores the assigned client identifier and receives and displays the HTML document. In response to the selection of the order button, the client system sends to the server system a request to purchase the identified item. The server system receives the request and combines the purchaser information associated with the client identifier of the client system to generate an order to purchase the item in accordance with the billing and shipment information whereby the purchaser effects the ordering of the product by selection of the order button.

As you can see, there's no specific information. It patents the damn process of clicking a button and some vague description the backend doing its thing that makes the button work. I could have a completely different way of doing this than Amazon, but look at that patent. You can change a few of words around and make it sound like something else. It is almost describing any button ever that does something that needs some backend processing, with a couple of delimiters that reduce that to any button used to make a purchase online ever. The thing is just saying how client-server systems work, and any developer, even a mediocre one, would've read this and thrown it away, but that didn't happen. This is a completely different beast than what a patent was intended to be, or should be, like. I have mostly no issues with patents over physical stuff, but way too many software ones are just ridiculous.

Also if you think this is a misrepresentation because it's the abstract, take a look at the "specific" claims. They're just as ridiculous and maddening. They literally refer to the process of using your mouse to move a cursor on the screen and click a button on a browser.

Just to play devil's advocate, the claim seems to specifically focus on Amazon's one-click ordering system. It still doesn't provide much information about how the system actually works, but it does require that "only a single action" be performed to initiate the purchase. A court would construe that very narrowly for purposes of infringement. The claim also requires that the item must be ordered "without using a shopping cart ordering model," which the patent lawyer probably had to add specifically because the examiner found lots of prior art describing typical online shopping systems that use shopping carts. It's likely that the examiner couldn't find any prior art that describes ordering something straight from the product page with only a single click, so he allowed the patent. Maybe that's "obvious," and maybe the patent should be confined to a specific implementation rather than the entire concept, but the fact remains that Amazon came up with something that, as far as I know, no one else had done before.

 

[A.Felix]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

Yeah, if 1 was obvious, it would happen, but too often, it’s not only not obvious, but totally unknown, so the patent goes through.

There’s really nothing wrong with stupid patents. I’ve seen plenty of those over the years. But stupid patent almost always means valid patents that patent something stupid that no one will ever want to do, so no one cares.

Stupidly patenting something that shouldn’t be allowed to be patented is something else.

Well, the problem with #1 is who is the one judging if it is obvious or not. Some patent office clerk at the turn of the millennium may not see some network printing tech as obvious, while someone who works with networks would throw the application away wondering why someone wanted to patent something so stupidly obvious, like the sharing of resources in the network, which is what networks are for. On the other hand someone can come up with some patent that I would read and think "this is some breakthrough shit" only to have a person well versed in the subject come up and tell me I'm an idiot for allowing that to be patented when there's prior art going back to when token ring networks were still a thing.

To understand the concepts of patents, you need to understand that it’s not what the patent claim is about, it’s how the claim does it. You can have 10 valid patents on ways of sharing resources over a network. There’s no exclusivity in many things.

You can take a valid patent and add to it in a way that makes possible something that the original patent can’t do, and patent the combination as a new patent.

The patent system is versatile. But errors creep in. Modern technology is extraordinary complex. Some patents take dozens of pages to explain.

Regular patents, yes, however, the big issue is that this has not applied to software patents. On a non-software patent you register the implementation. You make a lightbulb and the specific filament you used to create light is patented. Anyone else can come up with a different composition for the filament and you get a different patent, or use halogen gas, or LEDs. Software patents tend to be about concepts, like "using electricity to heat up a substance and create light", as opposed to a specific implementation. This is why there are so many patent trolls in software. For example, here's a very famous patent:

A method and system for placing an order to purchase an item via the Internet. The order is placed by a purchaser at a client system and received by a server system. The server system receives purchaser information including identification of the purchaser, payment information, and shipment information from the client system. The server system then assigns a client identifier to the client system and associates the assigned client identifier with the received purchaser information. The server system sends to the client system the assigned client identifier and an HTML document identifying the item and including an order button. The client system receives and stores the assigned client identifier and receives and displays the HTML document. In response to the selection of the order button, the client system sends to the server system a request to purchase the identified item. The server system receives the request and combines the purchaser information associated with the client identifier of the client system to generate an order to purchase the item in accordance with the billing and shipment information whereby the purchaser effects the ordering of the product by selection of the order button.

As you can see, there's no specific information. It patents the damn process of clicking a button and some vague description the backend doing its thing that makes the button work. I could have a completely different way of doing this than Amazon, but look at that patent. You can change a few of words around and make it sound like something else. It is almost describing any button ever that does something that needs some backend processing, with a couple of delimiters that reduce that to any button used to make a purchase online ever. The thing is just saying how client-server systems work, and any developer, even a mediocre one, would've read this and thrown it away, but that didn't happen. This is a completely different beast than what a patent was intended to be, or should be, like. I have mostly no issues with patents over physical stuff, but way too many software ones are just ridiculous.

Also if you think this is a misrepresentation because it's the abstract, take a look at the "specific" claims. They're just as ridiculous and maddening. They literally refer to the process of using your mouse to move a cursor on the screen and click a button on a browser.

Just to play devil's advocate, the claim seems to specifically focus on Amazon's one-click ordering system. It still doesn't provide much information about how the system actually works, but it does require that "only a single action" be performed to initiate the purchase. A court would construe that very narrowly for purposes of infringement. The claim also requires that the item must be ordered "without using a shopping cart ordering model," which the patent lawyer probably had to add specifically because the examiner found lots of prior art describing typical online shopping systems that use shopping carts. It's likely that the examiner couldn't find any prior art that describes ordering something straight from the product page with only a single click, so he allowed the patent. Maybe that's "obvious," and maybe the patent should be confined to a specific implementation rather than the entire concept, but the fact remains that Amazon came up with something that, as far as I know, no one else had done before.

Yes, but note that it's not addressing how you do it. It's all about what you do. It's like saying it specifies that lightbulb works by electricity running through a filament or through a gas and heats it up, producing light. That prevents any competing filament from ever getting a patent, which in the years of the lightbulb many did. You could change filament to gas and that prevents halogen and neon from being two different light producing technologies. I can't do a different one-click ordering system without a shopping cart without violating this patent. 10 years after being granted technologies were different, software development had evolved, hardware changed, and my implementation of one-click without a shopping cart would be different almost by necessity, and yet I wouldn't be able to get around the fact that the patent is about one-click purchase itself, not about how you make your own one-click purchase, as is the case with physical patents.

 

[greenleaves]

"SAD! .... very SAD! .... our beautiful patent system is being abused. DO SOMETHING!"
#FAKENEWS ... it's golfing time.

 

[red4scare]

Just to play devil's advocate, the claim seems to specifically focus on Amazon's one-click ordering system. It still doesn't provide much information about how the system actually works, but it does require that "only a single action" be performed to initiate the purchase. A court would construe that very narrowly for purposes of infringement. The claim also requires that the item must be ordered "without using a shopping cart ordering model," which the patent lawyer probably had to add specifically because the examiner found lots of prior art describing typical online shopping systems that use shopping carts. It's likely that the examiner couldn't find any prior art that describes ordering something straight from the product page with only a single click, so he allowed the patent. Maybe that's "obvious," and maybe the patent should be confined to a specific implementation rather than the entire concept, but the fact remains that Amazon came up with something that, as far as I know, no one else had done before.

OK! So if patenting one-click ordering is fine, then I guess patenting 2-clicks ordering is also fine. And 3-click as well, obviously. So I guess that sometime in the future we'll be needing to click 8654 times to place an order so the merchant is not infringing nor paying for any patent.

Also, prior art for buying something? Amazon came up with something that no one had done before? I mean, one thing is playing devil's advocate and another thing altogether is playing dumb. Most software patents are pure generic BS. Patent an specific algorithm to solve some problem? OK-ish, I guess. Patent "doing stuff on a computer over the internet"? No no no no no no.

 

[melgross]

I'm hugely overworked, leading to large backlogs, with no end in sight. Do I:

1) say "no" to stupid applications with obvious prior art and no advancement of the state of the art and have to spend a lot of time documenting, arguing, and then seeing the re-application?

OR

2) say "yes" and everyone is happy? The backlog shrinks, the applicant is pleased, etc...

I wonder how much this occurs in real life at the patent office...

Yeah, if 1 was obvious, it would happen, but too often, it’s not only not obvious, but totally unknown, so the patent goes through.

There’s really nothing wrong with stupid patents. I’ve seen plenty of those over the years. But stupid patent almost always means valid patents that patent something stupid that no one will ever want to do, so no one cares.

Stupidly patenting something that shouldn’t be allowed to be patented is something else.

Well, the problem with #1 is who is the one judging if it is obvious or not. Some patent office clerk at the turn of the millennium may not see some network printing tech as obvious, while someone who works with networks would throw the application away wondering why someone wanted to patent something so stupidly obvious, like the sharing of resources in the network, which is what networks are for. On the other hand someone can come up with some patent that I would read and think "this is some breakthrough shit" only to have a person well versed in the subject come up and tell me I'm an idiot for allowing that to be patented when there's prior art going back to when token ring networks were still a thing.

Office clerks do the same everywhere, they file things and retrieve them. Office clerks don’t make any of these decisions, as you should well know. Patent examiners make them. They are experts in the field they examine. But there are so many patents out there, and so much work being done, with hundreds of papers in many different journals filed every year in every area, that it’s impossible to keep up.

You can’t properly blame the examiners. Every one of us makes mistakes. Anyone who claims otherwise is either naive or narcissistic.

To understand the concepts of patents, you need to understand that it’s not what the patent claim is about, it’s how the claim does it. You can have 10 valid patents on ways of sharing resources over a network. There’s no exclusivity in many things.

You can take a valid patent and add to it in a way that makes possible something that the original patent can’t do, and patent the combination as a new patent.

The patent system is versatile. But errors creep in. Modern technology is extraordinary complex. Some patents take dozens of pages to explain.

He's actually right on the clerk part. Patent examiners are often called patent clerks. He was referring to them as clerks who work at the patent office. Not actual office clerks.

They’re not clerks though. Some people may refer to them that way, but they’re wrong.

 

[melgross]

I am not an inventor or patent examiner but MANY of the patents discussed in these articles seem obvious TO ME.

Only because you know about them.

 

[Babymech]

Poorly written article, even if the spirit is right. There are too many of these patent outrage articles that have no understanding of patents, and don't take the time to get it right. Writing "The patent claims to cover a "printing and publishing system" that uses "a communication network." Amazing, right? " is unnecessary and intellectually dishonest - the patent is linked in the text, so choosing to leave out ~190 words of the first independent claim is intellectual dishonesty (or laziness), plain and simple.

In patent claims, every word matters. There are three independent claims in the patent, and the shortest is 110 words, and each of them matters. This is a bad patent, but it's also a bad article, and that doesn't help anyone. Articles like this is why most patent professionals dismiss criticism against the patent system as uninformed, lazy rants, and fail to appreciate the actual criticism.

Also, from an editorial stand-point it's probably not a good idea to use IPRs as an acronym for the fairly obscure legal term of inter partes reviews, when your article is all about IPRs (Intellectual Property Rights). It's like using IP to mean intellectual property in an article about internet protocol addresses.

 

[MerlinGuy]

A man got a job painting lines on the highway. The after the first day he told his boss he had painted 3 miles of lines. After the second day he told his boss he painted 1 mile of lines. After the third day he reported only painting 100 feet of lines. "You did so great on the first day, pretty good on the second, so why so little today?" asked his boss. "Each day I get further and further from the paint can." was his reply.

The more patents we have the harder it is to review each patent correctly. Add to that the patent system has evolved from protecting the development costs of creating a new product to an adhoc licensing system doesn't help.