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Former lawyer here: One of the key takeaways from this is that even if you don't want to exclude other people from using and building on your invention, you sh
by andjd 8y ago
Former lawyer here:
One of the key takeaways from this is that even if you don't want to exclude other people from using and building on your invention, you should still patent it. It's much cheaper to file the patent--you don't even need to hire a lawyer to do it--than it is to fight off someone else.
But I also agree with the other comments here that if patent examiners need to do a more through search for prior art than just examining other existing patents, especially in domains where there are open-source communities. That would involve a modest increase in cost to the government, much or all of which could be covered by increasing the patent filing fees, and be a huge economic benefit for companies large and small that get harassed by dubious patents.
- patentatt 8y agoThe problem seems to be how to measure such an effort. It's easy to list a few classes and subclasses (of the patent database) and say that you've searched through those entirely, but the whole internet? What documentation would be sufficient to convey that the Examiner had searched thoroughly enough? Examiners are already urged to search NPL (non-patent literature) sources, but it seems too amorphous to establish standards for what sources need to be searched and how thoroughly. And the tooling isn't there either. Natural language search engines aren't precise enough for a real search for information (don't want the googles guessing what you 'really' meant to search for). When I was an examiner, for what it's worth, I always searched at least IEEE, CiteSeerX, and Dialog databases, but I'm not sure that a KickStarter campaign would have come up in any of those databases either.