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.
