8 ms·

Evidence of regulatory capture of patent examiners

159 points by Gimpei 8y ago

natosaichek 8y ago
I saw an argument not long ago that the revolving door ensures more rigorous review of the regulated company. Basically, domain experts are hired out of a regulatory agency if they demonstrate their domain expertise by being a competent regulator. Would you want to hire someone who didn't do their job well? Also, the 'toughest' regulators are the ones who the companies don't want in their jobs anymore - they'd rather those people were on the other side of the fence, so they hire them. The people who are soft (or incompetent) are useful in their role, so are left alone, not hired out. Not sure this is actually true, but the incentive arguments seem like they run in the right direction. This may not apply to patents as much as other regulatory agencies due to the way patents are argued (Not in court)? Maybe they cover these arguments in the paper... I just read the abstract and didn't pay to get the whole thing.
- mchannon 8y ago
  Would I want to hire someone who didn't do their job well? Absolutely, if their incompetence was incompetence in my favor, which is something I'd want to reward. Alternately, if hiring them off freed up an opening for a friendlier regulator, I'd hire them that way too. Kind of like how donating to the political campaigns of the longest-lasting, most honorable, and least corruptible judges in your local area will ensure they'll always recuse themselves in litigation you find yourself involved in. To appear balanced, patent examiners must feel more than a little pressure to come down hard on the little guy.
- throw2016 8y ago
  Given the mountains of conflicting evidence with the recent financial crisis that has cost trillions and the crisis before that this argument seems to be baseless. The linked paper itself goes into some detail to explore alternative explanations in good faith before confirming something of the opposite. The idea that a revolving door does not have deep ethical implications with massive conflict of interest can be made in good faith only in an 'idealized' world, in which case everything is moot.
- tripletao 8y ago
  If I worked for a regulator and wanted to maximize my revolving-door compensation, then I'm not sure whether I'd want to be harsh or lenient. As you say, there are forces in both directions. I'd probably aim for the middle of the pack, since I (a) don't want to make my future employer hate me, and (b) also don't want them to think I'm an idiot lackey more valuable to them in government than on their payroll. But, I think I have a pretty straightforward incentive to create maximum procedural complexity--that is, to draft and enforce regulations that require lots of administrative effort to comply with, but in the end have little economic effect beyond the legal fees. If I'm really clever, then I might even get whoever thought regulation was needed to perceive the paperwork burden as satisfying that--so the company might not even mind the legal fees, if they get an offsetting PR benefit from the procedurally strict (but substantively meaningless) rules. This is the legal equivalent of a computer programmer's job security through poorly-documented code, just with the creation and maintenance phases split across two different employers. A lot of what patent attorneys do sure feels like it meets that description. If the regulatory capture mentioned in the paper exists, then I'd guess it works more through that procedural complexity than through substance.
  - btilly 8y ago
    The problem is that a lot of people think that way, but "middle of the road" actually means average where the average is people who are middle of the road to people trying to be nice to a future employer. The result is a ratchet effect making patent examiners more and more friendly to patent applicants over time.
    - tripletao 8y ago
      That kind of ratchet can happen, but I still think the "be nice" effect is much less important than the "add procedural complexity" effect. I don't see how a study could distinguish the two without re-examining every patent, but: 1. Anecdotally over my interactions with patent examiners (using both large firms studied in the linked article and small firms), that's how it felt. I never felt the big firms were getting directly special treatment. I often felt they had an oddly perfect understanding of a mostly-arbitrary set of rules not necessarily grounded in any statute or case law that they nonetheless somehow shared with the examiners. 2. The "complexity" effect doesn't require trust. The former examiner genuinely has specialized knowledge that will benefit the new employer, so the employer has an incentive (beyond some vague hope of goodwill from examiners still in government) to keep up the bargain.
- PeterStuer 8y ago
  Revolving doors are usually delayed compensation for services rendered, not the future potential of the candidate going through the door.
- michaelt 8y ago
  Former British chancellor George Osborne passed a bunch of pension deregulation - then was hired by investment management company BlackRock being paid £650,000 ($859,000) a year to work 1 day a week [1]. IMHO this fits better with the "deferred compensation" model of regulatory capture than it does with the one you outlined. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=George+Osborne+BlackRock https://www.google.com/search?q=George+Osborne+BlackRock
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- rayiner 8y ago
  There is also a major confounding factor: many people come from industry to begin with, and want to become regulators because they think that light regulation will benefit the industry and the public. Imagine there was a privacy regulator. Do you think all the folks on HN cringing about GPDR now, would, if they found themselves working at said regulator, act to regulate the tech industry aggressively? Or would they regulate lightly, out of the belief that big-data supported companies are beneficial to the public?
  - dhimes 8y ago
    Pai: Verizon -> FCC
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - rayiner 8y ago
      Note that Pai worked for a couple of years at VZN, as a relatively junior person just a few years after graduating law school. He then spent a decade in the public sector, before becoming a partner at a law firm. Which raises the other issue: many regulators go work at law firms, who benefit from more regulation, not less. Those positions are generally also more lucrative than positions in the regulated companies themselves. So there is good reason to believe that the incentives are aligned toward overregulation, not underregulation.
    - snowwrestler 8y ago
      Wheeler came from the industry too, though.
- galieos_ghost 8y ago
  Anywhere power is consolidated is going to be targeted for corrupt purposes. Around 50 people on the Congressional budget committees are effectively in charge of trillions of dollars of spending by the federal government, making it easy to bribe and get in your pork spending. Most startups would be far better off making a few donations to some politicians and getting fat government contracts rather than making a great product. Just look at Amazon and their billion dollar federal cloud contracts. Politicians sell themselves cheap, the ROI is fantastic, probably the best growth hack out there. Logical conclusion is to limit the size and power of the government to limit consolidation of power and thus make corruption less worthwhile/viable. The founding fathers understood this and that's why they essentially limited the federal government to only managing national defense and left the rest to the states, if you didn't like what your state was doing you could vote with your feet.
tcbawo 8y ago
I would be interested to see a patent/intellectual property system that was incorporated into a market for licensing. Taxes would be levied on the market value. You would pay taxes based on the royalties collected in the open market, or you could release intellectual property into the public domain.
- patentatt 8y ago
  Licensing revenue would probably be taxed as corporate income. Also, maintenance fees increase as the years go by, so it only makes economic sense to keep paying fees for valuable patents.
- cameldrv 8y ago
  I'd like to see something like this too, but the tax is based on bonafide offers to license the patent rather than actual licensing revenue. You don't want me to make my cool gadget that infringes on your patent? Ok, fine, but if I register an offer to you for a million dollars for a license, and you turn me down, you have to pay say, 10% as a tax. You're a small independent inventor/patent troll? Either pony up for the government keeping everyone else off your turf, or take the money and move on.
  - tcbawo 8y ago
    As I mentioned, there needs to be both components, royalties and valuation. I'm not sure what the proper mix would be, but it seems like an area where a market based solution could work. You'd probably need some form of arbitration to hammer out explicitly what is novel/being licensed. Patent trolls and large IP war-chest holding companies would probably hate this.
    - patentatt 8y ago
      The thing is that patent valuation is a black art, it’s not a science. The best approach as you suggest is market based, but for a lot of IP there is no efficient market setting prices. How often do we read headlines of $X billion in damages ‘awarded’ as the result of some litigation, only to find out years later that that number was overturned on appeal and it was really much much lower in the end. It’s just an imprecise thing.
custos 8y ago
Are there any decent plausible solutions to the problem of regulatory capture? Are there any laws restricting companies from "lobbying" regulators or engaging in quid pro quo?
- alex_anglin 8y ago
  On the upside - competitive pay and benefits with industry. Probably a tough sell for many. On the downside - restrict employment opportunities for X years after being in a specific position. Clearly both have issues, but regulatory capture is a problem worth solving.
  - patentatt 8y ago
    Patent examiners top out at like $140’s pretty much. Nobody that’s GS scale makes over $160. Starting salary at big law firms is $180 + bonus. So you have a fair pint there. Also, as far as time bars, the PTO does something like this. Former examiners are not allowed to apply for a patent for a term after they leave. Doesn’t really solve the problem, but it’s something.
    - pwg 8y ago
      The USPTO also bars former examiner's from working as an attorney on cases in the area in which they previously examined for two years after they leave the USPTO. I do not know how carefully this rule is enforced.
      - patentatt 8y ago
        Good point, I think it’s really on the honor system with the threat of invalidating a patent in some later litigation.
- forapurpose 8y ago
  > Are there any decent plausible solutions to the problem of regulatory capture? It would be interesting to see research on various solutions around the world. One obvious solution is paying people market rates for their work; then they don't have an incentive to work in industry. One way government has done that is by providing job security and regular hours as a perk to compensate for lower pay. In the U.S., the Republican Party (I'm not saying it to be partisan; it's just fact) had been trying to cut pay, cut job security, and also cut personnel, which increases the workload. It's not hard to see where that might lead.
patentatt 8y ago
I’m pretty skeptical: 1) Granting a patent doesn’t necessarily mean that the examiner is more lenient or that the applicant got something good. There are good patents and bad ones, strong ones and weak ones. A high allowance rate may be an indication of very narrow patents which pad corporate quarterly numbers, but don’t have very much significance as patents. 2) This high volume, low value patent prosecution strategy is often seen in large corporate files, the same ones who hire patent attorneys. 3)Examiners deal with an attorney who is usually employed by some independent law firm. The underlying client is often not in direct contact with the patent office at all. 4) those large corporate filers are often in a technology niche. Particular pharma drugs, certain high tech niches like display tech or semiconductor fab, etc. The point is, these are small worlds, and if someone has the background to examine that kind of patent, they are probably in a very small group of people qualified to work on that technology. If they then get a law degree and go into private practice, there’s a good chance they cross paths with an entity that they examined patents of. In some of these tech areas there may be only a few dozen people in total (notionwide) who are qualified in the tech and are in the patent law field, it’s a small world. 5) All the same goes for law firms, there just aren’t that many people in this business, it’s not unlikely to cross paths. 6) bad patents aren’t good. Let me explain. If you’re a patent prosecutor worth your salt, you want a thorough examination. The last thing you want is to have a portfolio of patents which fall apart in IPR. It makes you look really really bad to your clients. hypothetically bribing an examiner is a fools errand, not just in a moral sense, but it’s literally a bad position to be in to get a bunch of bogus patents. Nobody wants that, it’s actually bad. 7) measuring patent quality in terms of citation is a red herring. First, some patents may have a different ‘lifespan’ to when they’re relevant. Some may be immediately cited a bunch, others may linger for a few years before being suddenly relevant due to some other development. But most of all, remember that patents cited on the front page of a patent are largely from the applicant themselves, cited in an IDS. So if a large portfolio starts citing a certain document, it might get cited in 10’s or 100’s of other cases that are somewhat related. And if you’re going to use it as a measure of low quality, that just bolsters my original argument that these would mostly be very narrow patents, a type of low quality but not the type that the public should care about. Shareholders, yes, as it’s a waste of corporate resources. Not anyone else.
- 8y ago
jedberg 8y ago
The patent examiners don't have to wait till they leave to work for corporate. Many of them already have full time jobs and do patent examination as their side job. Their only requirement is to recuse themselves from patents filed by their company or their friends. I'll bet it's pretty easy for two companies to make a deal to pay bonuses to each other's employees when patents are granted.
- josaka 8y ago
  Any evidence of moonlighting? Never heard of this, at least in US practice with any prevalence. Would be curious to hear the basis, even if anecdotal.
  - jedberg 8y ago
    I have multiple friends that are part time patent examiners and hold full time jobs otherwise. They are experts in their fields that get tapped to review patents. Usually they get the job because they have filed a bunch of patents. Edit: For the record, I don't think any of my friends are corrupt. In fact, they're the most ethical people I know and take the job very seriously. I'm just saying it could happen if the examiner were already inclined to corruption.
    - tripletao 8y ago
      So I'm clear: You're saying that your friends work part-time for the USPTO examining patents? Like, they're paid by the USA government to read patent applications, and help determine whether each claim is allowed or rejected? It's very common for experienced engineers to review patents for private companies (to help them judge whether they infringe, assess the commercial value of a portfolio they might buy, etc.). I've never heard of a part-time patent examiner, and I'm interested to learn more--the conflicts of interest would seem extraordinary.
      - patentatt 8y ago
        Yeah, that’s not really a thing. Maybe, just maybe, the PTO may hire consultants on rare occasion to help with a very cutting edge tech, maybe. Perhaps that’s what OP may be referring to? And then I very highly doubt the consultant would be actually examining, more like just consulting on the technology. But it’s not like patent examining is a part time job, that’s just ... not how it works.
stcredzero 8y ago
Whenever I've tussled with domain experts in patents here on HN, I receive these messages from them: 1) Patents are the way they are, because it's a finely honed machine. 2) You're an ignorant rube. Perhaps that's true. On the other hand, what patents say often seems to contradict common sense. It makes me wonder if the whole field isn't ideologically subsumed.
- patentatt 8y ago
  The whole field is about being absolutely precise with language, in writing and reading. It’s tough to do in English, the language just wasn’t built for it. So patent practitioners have sort of developed a way of being precise with a malleable langauage. Much of the really odd stuff can be understood through that lens. Note, that precise doesn’t mean “clear” or “easy to understand,” something may be precisely broad in just the way intended, while being precisely clear and narrow in other ways. That’s another inpedence mismatch between normal humans and patent people.

159 points by Gimpei 8y ago

I saw an argument not long ago that the revolving door ensures more rigorous review of the regulated company. Basically, domain experts are hired out of a regulatory agency if they demonstrate their domain expertise by being a competent regulator. Would you want to hire someone who didn't do their job well? Also, the 'toughest' regulators are the ones who the companies don't want in their jobs anymore - they'd rather those people were on the other side of the fence, so they hire them. The people who are soft (or incompetent) are useful in their role, so are left alone, not hired out. Not sure this is actually true, but the incentive arguments seem like they run in the right direction. This may not apply to patents as much as other regulatory agencies due to the way patents are argued (Not in court)? Maybe they cover these arguments in the paper... I just read the abstract and didn't pay to get the whole thing.

mchannon 8y ago
Would I want to hire someone who didn't do their job well? Absolutely, if their incompetence was incompetence in my favor, which is something I'd want to reward. Alternately, if hiring them off freed up an opening for a friendlier regulator, I'd hire them that way too. Kind of like how donating to the political campaigns of the longest-lasting, most honorable, and least corruptible judges in your local area will ensure they'll always recuse themselves in litigation you find yourself involved in. To appear balanced, patent examiners must feel more than a little pressure to come down hard on the little guy.
throw2016 8y ago
Given the mountains of conflicting evidence with the recent financial crisis that has cost trillions and the crisis before that this argument seems to be baseless. The linked paper itself goes into some detail to explore alternative explanations in good faith before confirming something of the opposite. The idea that a revolving door does not have deep ethical implications with massive conflict of interest can be made in good faith only in an 'idealized' world, in which case everything is moot.
tripletao 8y ago
If I worked for a regulator and wanted to maximize my revolving-door compensation, then I'm not sure whether I'd want to be harsh or lenient. As you say, there are forces in both directions. I'd probably aim for the middle of the pack, since I (a) don't want to make my future employer hate me, and (b) also don't want them to think I'm an idiot lackey more valuable to them in government than on their payroll. But, I think I have a pretty straightforward incentive to create maximum procedural complexity--that is, to draft and enforce regulations that require lots of administrative effort to comply with, but in the end have little economic effect beyond the legal fees. If I'm really clever, then I might even get whoever thought regulation was needed to perceive the paperwork burden as satisfying that--so the company might not even mind the legal fees, if they get an offsetting PR benefit from the procedurally strict (but substantively meaningless) rules. This is the legal equivalent of a computer programmer's job security through poorly-documented code, just with the creation and maintenance phases split across two different employers. A lot of what patent attorneys do sure feels like it meets that description. If the regulatory capture mentioned in the paper exists, then I'd guess it works more through that procedural complexity than through substance.
- btilly 8y ago
  The problem is that a lot of people think that way, but "middle of the road" actually means average where the average is people who are middle of the road to people trying to be nice to a future employer. The result is a ratchet effect making patent examiners more and more friendly to patent applicants over time.
  - tripletao 8y ago
    That kind of ratchet can happen, but I still think the "be nice" effect is much less important than the "add procedural complexity" effect. I don't see how a study could distinguish the two without re-examining every patent, but: 1. Anecdotally over my interactions with patent examiners (using both large firms studied in the linked article and small firms), that's how it felt. I never felt the big firms were getting directly special treatment. I often felt they had an oddly perfect understanding of a mostly-arbitrary set of rules not necessarily grounded in any statute or case law that they nonetheless somehow shared with the examiners. 2. The "complexity" effect doesn't require trust. The former examiner genuinely has specialized knowledge that will benefit the new employer, so the employer has an incentive (beyond some vague hope of goodwill from examiners still in government) to keep up the bargain.
PeterStuer 8y ago
Revolving doors are usually delayed compensation for services rendered, not the future potential of the candidate going through the door.
michaelt 8y ago
Former British chancellor George Osborne passed a bunch of pension deregulation - then was hired by investment management company BlackRock being paid £650,000 ($859,000) a year to work 1 day a week [1]. IMHO this fits better with the "deferred compensation" model of regulatory capture than it does with the one you outlined. [1] https://www.google.com/search?q=George+Osborne+BlackRock https://www.google.com/search?q=George+Osborne+BlackRock
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
rayiner 8y ago
There is also a major confounding factor: many people come from industry to begin with, and want to become regulators because they think that light regulation will benefit the industry and the public. Imagine there was a privacy regulator. Do you think all the folks on HN cringing about GPDR now, would, if they found themselves working at said regulator, act to regulate the tech industry aggressively? Or would they regulate lightly, out of the belief that big-data supported companies are beneficial to the public?
- dhimes 8y ago
  Pai: Verizon -> FCC
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - rayiner 8y ago
    Note that Pai worked for a couple of years at VZN, as a relatively junior person just a few years after graduating law school. He then spent a decade in the public sector, before becoming a partner at a law firm. Which raises the other issue: many regulators go work at law firms, who benefit from more regulation, not less. Those positions are generally also more lucrative than positions in the regulated companies themselves. So there is good reason to believe that the incentives are aligned toward overregulation, not underregulation.
  - snowwrestler 8y ago
    Wheeler came from the industry too, though.
galieos_ghost 8y ago
Anywhere power is consolidated is going to be targeted for corrupt purposes. Around 50 people on the Congressional budget committees are effectively in charge of trillions of dollars of spending by the federal government, making it easy to bribe and get in your pork spending. Most startups would be far better off making a few donations to some politicians and getting fat government contracts rather than making a great product. Just look at Amazon and their billion dollar federal cloud contracts. Politicians sell themselves cheap, the ROI is fantastic, probably the best growth hack out there. Logical conclusion is to limit the size and power of the government to limit consolidation of power and thus make corruption less worthwhile/viable. The founding fathers understood this and that's why they essentially limited the federal government to only managing national defense and left the rest to the states, if you didn't like what your state was doing you could vote with your feet.

tcbawo 8y ago

I would be interested to see a patent/intellectual property system that was incorporated into a market for licensing. Taxes would be levied on the market value. You would pay taxes based on the royalties collected in the open market, or you could release intellectual property into the public domain.

patentatt 8y ago
Licensing revenue would probably be taxed as corporate income. Also, maintenance fees increase as the years go by, so it only makes economic sense to keep paying fees for valuable patents.
cameldrv 8y ago
I'd like to see something like this too, but the tax is based on bonafide offers to license the patent rather than actual licensing revenue. You don't want me to make my cool gadget that infringes on your patent? Ok, fine, but if I register an offer to you for a million dollars for a license, and you turn me down, you have to pay say, 10% as a tax. You're a small independent inventor/patent troll? Either pony up for the government keeping everyone else off your turf, or take the money and move on.
- tcbawo 8y ago
  As I mentioned, there needs to be both components, royalties and valuation. I'm not sure what the proper mix would be, but it seems like an area where a market based solution could work. You'd probably need some form of arbitration to hammer out explicitly what is novel/being licensed. Patent trolls and large IP war-chest holding companies would probably hate this.
  - patentatt 8y ago
    The thing is that patent valuation is a black art, it’s not a science. The best approach as you suggest is market based, but for a lot of IP there is no efficient market setting prices. How often do we read headlines of $X billion in damages ‘awarded’ as the result of some litigation, only to find out years later that that number was overturned on appeal and it was really much much lower in the end. It’s just an imprecise thing.

custos 8y ago

Are there any decent plausible solutions to the problem of regulatory capture? Are there any laws restricting companies from "lobbying" regulators or engaging in quid pro quo?

alex_anglin 8y ago
On the upside - competitive pay and benefits with industry. Probably a tough sell for many. On the downside - restrict employment opportunities for X years after being in a specific position. Clearly both have issues, but regulatory capture is a problem worth solving.
- patentatt 8y ago
  Patent examiners top out at like $140’s pretty much. Nobody that’s GS scale makes over $160. Starting salary at big law firms is $180 + bonus. So you have a fair pint there. Also, as far as time bars, the PTO does something like this. Former examiners are not allowed to apply for a patent for a term after they leave. Doesn’t really solve the problem, but it’s something.
  - pwg 8y ago
    The USPTO also bars former examiner's from working as an attorney on cases in the area in which they previously examined for two years after they leave the USPTO. I do not know how carefully this rule is enforced.
    - patentatt 8y ago
      Good point, I think it’s really on the honor system with the threat of invalidating a patent in some later litigation.
forapurpose 8y ago
> Are there any decent plausible solutions to the problem of regulatory capture? It would be interesting to see research on various solutions around the world. One obvious solution is paying people market rates for their work; then they don't have an incentive to work in industry. One way government has done that is by providing job security and regular hours as a perk to compensate for lower pay. In the U.S., the Republican Party (I'm not saying it to be partisan; it's just fact) had been trying to cut pay, cut job security, and also cut personnel, which increases the workload. It's not hard to see where that might lead.

patentatt 8y ago

I’m pretty skeptical: 1) Granting a patent doesn’t necessarily mean that the examiner is more lenient or that the applicant got something good. There are good patents and bad ones, strong ones and weak ones. A high allowance rate may be an indication of very narrow patents which pad corporate quarterly numbers, but don’t have very much significance as patents. 2) This high volume, low value patent prosecution strategy is often seen in large corporate files, the same ones who hire patent attorneys. 3)Examiners deal with an attorney who is usually employed by some independent law firm. The underlying client is often not in direct contact with the patent office at all. 4) those large corporate filers are often in a technology niche. Particular pharma drugs, certain high tech niches like display tech or semiconductor fab, etc. The point is, these are small worlds, and if someone has the background to examine that kind of patent, they are probably in a very small group of people qualified to work on that technology. If they then get a law degree and go into private practice, there’s a good chance they cross paths with an entity that they examined patents of. In some of these tech areas there may be only a few dozen people in total (notionwide) who are qualified in the tech and are in the patent law field, it’s a small world. 5) All the same goes for law firms, there just aren’t that many people in this business, it’s not unlikely to cross paths. 6) bad patents aren’t good. Let me explain. If you’re a patent prosecutor worth your salt, you want a thorough examination. The last thing you want is to have a portfolio of patents which fall apart in IPR. It makes you look really really bad to your clients. hypothetically bribing an examiner is a fools errand, not just in a moral sense, but it’s literally a bad position to be in to get a bunch of bogus patents. Nobody wants that, it’s actually bad. 7) measuring patent quality in terms of citation is a red herring. First, some patents may have a different ‘lifespan’ to when they’re relevant. Some may be immediately cited a bunch, others may linger for a few years before being suddenly relevant due to some other development. But most of all, remember that patents cited on the front page of a patent are largely from the applicant themselves, cited in an IDS. So if a large portfolio starts citing a certain document, it might get cited in 10’s or 100’s of other cases that are somewhat related. And if you’re going to use it as a measure of low quality, that just bolsters my original argument that these would mostly be very narrow patents, a type of low quality but not the type that the public should care about. Shareholders, yes, as it’s a waste of corporate resources. Not anyone else.

8y ago

jedberg 8y ago

The patent examiners don't have to wait till they leave to work for corporate. Many of them already have full time jobs and do patent examination as their side job. Their only requirement is to recuse themselves from patents filed by their company or their friends. I'll bet it's pretty easy for two companies to make a deal to pay bonuses to each other's employees when patents are granted.

josaka 8y ago
Any evidence of moonlighting? Never heard of this, at least in US practice with any prevalence. Would be curious to hear the basis, even if anecdotal.
- jedberg 8y ago
  I have multiple friends that are part time patent examiners and hold full time jobs otherwise. They are experts in their fields that get tapped to review patents. Usually they get the job because they have filed a bunch of patents. Edit: For the record, I don't think any of my friends are corrupt. In fact, they're the most ethical people I know and take the job very seriously. I'm just saying it could happen if the examiner were already inclined to corruption.
  - tripletao 8y ago
    So I'm clear: You're saying that your friends work part-time for the USPTO examining patents? Like, they're paid by the USA government to read patent applications, and help determine whether each claim is allowed or rejected? It's very common for experienced engineers to review patents for private companies (to help them judge whether they infringe, assess the commercial value of a portfolio they might buy, etc.). I've never heard of a part-time patent examiner, and I'm interested to learn more--the conflicts of interest would seem extraordinary.
    - patentatt 8y ago
      Yeah, that’s not really a thing. Maybe, just maybe, the PTO may hire consultants on rare occasion to help with a very cutting edge tech, maybe. Perhaps that’s what OP may be referring to? And then I very highly doubt the consultant would be actually examining, more like just consulting on the technology. But it’s not like patent examining is a part time job, that’s just ... not how it works.

stcredzero 8y ago

Whenever I've tussled with domain experts in patents here on HN, I receive these messages from them: 1) Patents are the way they are, because it's a finely honed machine. 2) You're an ignorant rube. Perhaps that's true. On the other hand, what patents say often seems to contradict common sense. It makes me wonder if the whole field isn't ideologically subsumed.

patentatt 8y ago
The whole field is about being absolutely precise with language, in writing and reading. It’s tough to do in English, the language just wasn’t built for it. So patent practitioners have sort of developed a way of being precise with a malleable langauage. Much of the really odd stuff can be understood through that lens. Note, that precise doesn’t mean “clear” or “easy to understand,” something may be precisely broad in just the way intended, while being precisely clear and narrow in other ways. That’s another inpedence mismatch between normal humans and patent people.