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The patent office's real job is approving patents. The examination part is an unfortunate necessity, but only so far as it maintains the fiction that the patent

• patentatt 8y ago
  Well, to some extent this is true and in some ways totally inaccurate. There is a push in the Examination corps to assist inventors in efficiently identifying the patentable subject matter in their application and assisting the applicant in getting a patent on that subject matter. Buuuut, at the same time, the easiest thing in the world for an Examiner to do is to issue a rejection. Nobody ever got egg on their face for issuing a rejection (if there is a tenable grounds for it). But it is quite embarrassing to be the examiner who allows a facially silly patent (like the swinging on a swing patent, or the stick patent, for example). And, from the Examiner's perspective, they can get more counts (a measure of productivity) by issuing rejections and prolonging examination. So, in the end, the real goal of an Examiner is to get the good ones allowed and reject the bad ones (surprise surprise). It's just a very fact-dependent, laborious, and subjective process. So that sometimes you or I may disagree with some cherry-picked results from thousands of Examiners working nonstop, is not terribly surprising. To suggest that the entire system is broken because of this is extremely naive.