I was an intern at USPTO a few years ago, during my failed attempt to become a patent attorney. What I saw and experienced there was a closed-minded agency with

I was an intern at USPTO a few years ago, during my failed attempt to become a patent attorney. What I saw and experienced there was a closed-minded agency with a very narrow bureaucratic focus. The only "prior art" that normally got searched was the database of previously submitted patent applications and issued patents. There was no room for bringing in outside experience or common sense. Search the database, stamp the application "accept" or "reject", move on to the next application, get as many done in the bi-week as possible. This, I realized, is how we got so many garbage patents on well-known, obvious software techniques - if nobody thought software was patentable at the time, they wouldn't have bothered filing a patent application. Years later, when software became patentable, the first vulture to think of filing could snatch up the patent and 20 years of exclusivity even though they didn't invent a thing. Given how hard it is to make any lasting change to organizational culture, not to mention that we're under a different administration now, I expect that absolutely nothing came of this 2014 roundtable and nothing will until somebody really powerful gets burnt.