Patent Office needs a 'Slashdot for prior art'

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Anything would be an improvement

The patent office is being overwhelmed by the rapid advance of technology. It takes them as much as 4 _years_ to give their first response to a filing, and when they do respond, all they are able to manage is to have pulled what look like the important keywords from the patent application, and look for similar words in other existing patents. Depending on the specific examiner, there might be a few ounces of genuine thought in it, but generally it is reduced to a huge pattern-matching word-search exercise.

This is how you wind up with patents on blazingly obvious stuff that everyone has been doing for a long time - you can still get a patent on it if you simply use new terms and clever descriptions for what you are up to, because those words will not appear in the patent database.

In the dozen or so patents that I have personally interacted with, I have _never_ seen a single word from the patent office pointing to anything other than another patent filing. Zero pointers to a published research paper that pre-dates the application. Zero pointers to an existing product that predates it. Yet that's where the prior art usually lives for the big, dumb, obviously invalid patents that are granted, because no one bothered to try and patent what was common knowledge.

Posted by: spark555   Posted on: 04/21/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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