USPTO Peer Review Process To Begin Soon 116
An anonymous reader writes "As we've discussed several times before on Slashdot, the US patent office is looking to employ a Wiki-like process for reviewing patents. It's nowhere near as open as Wikipedia, but there are still numerous comparisons drawn to the well-known project in this Washington Post story. Patent office officials site the huge workload their case officers must deal with in order to handle the modern cycle of product development. Last year some 332,000 applications were handled by only 4,000 employees. 'The tremendous workload has often left examiners with little time to conduct thorough reviews, according to sympathetic critics. Under the pilot project, some companies submitting patent applications will agree to have them reviewed via the Internet. The list of volunteers already contains some of the most prominent names in computing, including Microsoft, Intel, Hewlett-Packard and Oracle, as well as IBM, though other applicants are welcome.'"
Why not unemployed, qualified paid volunteers (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not employ unemployed qualified volunteers and also pay them to do a peer review.
That way you solve two problems:
1. Boost employment to qualified people.
2. Prevent any bias since the people used by USPTO are unemployed anyway.
But, then like all other half-as$ed efforts by any Govt. agency, they will allow ballot stuffing by Microsoft and IBM....
no subject (Score:3, Insightful)
So each worker had to look at 83 of them PER YEAR
How the hell is this alot?
How Wonderful, M$ Employees Will Be Doing This (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:no subject (Score:5, Insightful)
That's not actually a lot if you think about it. Sure some patents are probably trivially rejectable, but many probably require some deciphering before you get to the "omg that's obvious" stage.
Like this 7 page [google.com] patent (yes, I'm picking on them) for table based multiplication. Not only is it an obvious idea, that even the average 10 year old could figure out, but it's already been used by many hardware manufacturers (ARM used it for the ARM7 multiplier for instance). From the first few claims the "invention" doesn't really seem invalid until you put it together, and realize that it's the mechanical equivalent of long hand multiplication.
While you or I would easily spot that patent and say "no shit," a patent examiner must be able to defend their decision, so they must actually cite prior art (or make a convincing argument the idea was obvious). That also takes time.
Tom
Re:well.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The purpose of patent protection is to grant the right of a person who comes up with something great to profit from it.
Without such protections, someone would invent something and then die of starvation before seeing any kind of profit. While he is trying to produce his invention, some megacorp would take his idea and put it in mass production and beat him to his own market. The inventor would be left with jack because noone would have to pay him to produce his innovation for themselves.
Re:Why not unemployed, qualified paid volunteers (Score:4, Insightful)
So... Where do you suppose these qualified volunteers will come from? Perhaps present and former employees of companies that develop and use the kind of technology that gets patented are the people with the knowledge to make informed contributions to this Patent Wiki? I mean honestly, where do you expect they will come from? Slashdot, maybe? Believe it or not, the average Slashdotter may not actually be qualified for this type of work, and is every bit as biased as you suggest anyone working a "big company" is.
Re:well.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes because clicking a mouse button in order to buy something is a fabulous idea - the inventor should earn 3.0 x 10^11 dollars for that.
someone would invent something and then die of starvation before seeing any kind of profit.
Yes because one click shopping is the only thing that made Amazon what it is today - if it wasn't for their patent on one click shopping, Amazon surely would have gone out of business by now.
While he is trying to produce his invention, some megacorp would take his idea and put it in mass production and beat him to his own market.
Yes, thank God that the "megacorps" don't steal/buy patent ideas for pennies on the dollar, and then put them into mass production, and use the threat of litigation to keep everyone else out of the market. Patents are used exclusively by the little guy to defend himself from these huge entities.
HELLO? Exactly which world are you living in? Your points are completely invalid due to the very abuses of the patent system that need to be corrected. As it currently stands, the patent system is NOT doing its job but getting in the way of progress since you can't come up with something new without risking some sort of litigation from someone with ambiguous patent claims.
Perhaps getting rid of them all together WOULD be a step in the right direction. That way we go back to trade secrets - you have a great idea, you keep your mouth shut, develop it, and try to be better than the other guy when competition arrives.
Re:This is more like Slash-like than wiki-like (Score:3, Insightful)
It's supposed to be, they consulted CndrTaco about it. It has even more elements of eBay and Amazon as well. I don't think it has much to do with the Wikipedia process at all from what I can tell.
Apparently "citing" Wikipedia is based on pure name recognition and easier to understand than slashdot/eBay/Amazon (and who knows, probably shades of Google PageRank will be in there as well).
rd
Patent ratings!! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's a difficult problem, but (Score:4, Insightful)
Remember, the law as it currently stands states, "A person shall be entitled to a patent unless..." Thus, the burden is on the examiner to PROVE that a patent should not be granted. This can be VERY hard, even when the technology appears clearly to be unpatentable.
I have to say, I am very surprised at some of the comments coming from such an educated group of people. Destructive criticism will get us nowhere.
Notwithstanding the problems of our current system, patents ARE important for protecting innovation. Countries from around the world recognize this, and, believe it or not, try to emulate our system for the protection of intellectual property.
Give the Patent Office some credit here. This is a DRASTIC and REVOLUTIONARY change they are trying to institute here. It is VERY progressive, and it seems very in-tune with the open-source trend in information sharing and collaboration. They clearly recognize the need for change, and they really are working to find the right solution.
So before you start ranting about how the patent office sucks and how patents should be abolished. Take some time to think about why patents fundamentally encourage and protect innovation, and why the job facing the Patent Office is not so easy.
Again, everyone is looking for a better solution. That is why the Office is testing this program! Maybe it will work, maybe it won't. One thing, however, is sure: unhelpful and unreasonable criticisms from close-minded individuals do not help.
Re:no subject (Score:3, Insightful)
I assume this statement will be followed up by an explanation of how to use Google to find documents with verifiable timestamps proving that they were published before a specific date.
Greater workload than you think... (Score:4, Insightful)
The vast majority (I'd say 98%) of patent apps are initially reviewed and rejected, but the attorney usually argues the rejection and/or adjusts the claims and sends the aplicaiton back. So the examiner has to re-review the application, and this back-and-forth action often goes on for months or years before the patent is finally issued or abandoned.
So really, each examiner is looking at twice as many applications a week as you think they are. Even though half of them are ones they've already seen, it typically takes 3-6 months to get a reply, and by then it's hard to remember all the details. Also, the claims are often so changed that a whole new prior art search is required. As Tom noted, it sometimes takes a while to dig up the prior art to shoot down each claim, even if the invention is clearly obvious.
At least in my art unit, it was rare to find an application with a spec that was under 20 pages and had less than 30 claims. I'd say 40-90 claims was the average. That's a lot of material to sift through, especially for entry-level engineers with little experience in the industry (which comprise the PTO's vast majority of employees). When I worked there, it was pretty standard for patent examiners to work 10 hour days in addition to Saturdays or Sundays, and not get paid for the overtime.
Re:well.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Which RCA did to Farnsworth even though he had a patent, so what's your argument?
Re:Why not unemployed, qualified paid volunteers (Score:2, Insightful)
Leaks are irrelevant. The wiki process would be (as far as I gathered, please correct me if I am wrong) open to anyone. By the very definition of a patent, the contents are disclosed in detail to the public and the Patent Office at the time of submission. Otherwise a patent application could be under review for a year while other people continued research on the subject, only to submit a patent application themselves on day 364, to be told immediately after that "aha, there was a patent application in for the same thing you were working on, and it was just granted". Neither is there really any need for secrecy - you can already contribute prior art by searching through the applied-but-not-yet-granted applications at the USPTO webpage, http://www.uspto.gov/patft/ [uspto.gov] . I therefore can't really see how in any way "leaks" would be relevant.
The bias I am talking about is intentionally using distortive language, connotative wording, distorted probability estimates, causal assumptions and all those other techniques that you are fully aware can spin any written text in any direction without changing the underlying "facts". "Obviousness" is just one example - if assistant patent reviewers are allowed to present written arguments, rationales, descriptions and explanations of *why* they believe something is an 'obvious extension' of existing art, it leaves the door wide open to bias.
It is gobsmacking that you somehow claim that 'unemployed people would not be biased' - are you serious? Have we grown up with different definitions of the word 'bias'? A bias of the above type (what I and I would say most reasonable people consider bias) can come from any of a massive number of sources of which pay is only one of them.
To connect the dots rather than use compartmentalised rhetoric here - you would probably argue that Fox News is biased, the Republican Party HQ Press is biased, that the Rand Institute is biased and that Stormfront is biased - and you would not argue that this is purely down to them being paid for it. As you are, again, I assume, capable of arguing that noncommercial bias exists, it should not be a stretch (unless you are seriously opposed to it, in which case I would look critically at your bias) that anyone else might also be biased through ideology rather than payment.
The answer to your question - how biased would an unemployed person just laid off by Ford be about Microsoft - it fully and completely depends. Does he hate Microsoft? Does he see Microsoft as an obstacle to world peace, prosperity and advancement that it is morally right to fight? Does he feel patents belong in the hands of small companies and those with a track record of turning them into products, and that Microsoft does not fit that bill? In short, does he feel an urge to deprive Microsoft of benefit? And is this urge something he may have opportunity to influence the patent reviewers with, through exercising judgement and writing things they read, essentially having a debate and discussion with them, rather than solely submitting prior art diagrams and measurements?
In that case he is completely unsuited as a patent reviewer, and for any other public office role that deals with Microsoft as well. The law should be equal for all, and where the law involves judgement, the judgement should be applied similarly to all similar subjects. Where there are distinctions between subject types (large software companies vs small software companies), the distinction should be completely public and transparent. I would argue that step 1 for any patent examiner is that he/she cannot choose which companies to review patents for - ideally that they don't even know which company filed it.
This written somewhat motivated by a general irritation of the ideological trend towards "payment makes bias, nonprofit makes unbiased" that seems to infest a lot these days.