3 ms·

I'll agree that many of the tools are bad. I have a particular dislike for how slow Word is. But, I don't think that transitioning everything to the cloud is ne

I'll agree that many of the tools are bad. I have a particular dislike for how slow Word is. But, I don't think that transitioning everything to the cloud is necessarily going to help. Word is slow many times because it freezes up when syncing. And a lot of the tools are good. EAST and PE2E Search have a lot of great features for power searchers that I'd like to see in tools outside of the USPTO. (But they also have a lot of annoyances.) I don't think more than 1/3 or so of my time is wasted due to these sorts of things. That's significant, but it won't be the game changer that doubling examination time would be. I don't know anything about what's happening on the backend, for what it's worth. I assume that it's always near exploding. By the way, you can find a bunch of annoying time wasters listed by examiners here: https://www.reddit.com/r/patentexaminer/comments/y9pyfx/mildly_infuriating_thread/ https://www.reddit.com/r/patentexaminer/comments/y9pyfx/mild... (Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

nostrebored 4y ago
But wouldn’t doubling the time reduce pressure for innovation here?
- mikewarot 4y ago
  Improving the time/quality of examination would reduce the number of bad patents, and thus raise the bar for something to get patented, requiring MORE actual innovation, and less fake process based crap.
- Naracion 4y ago
  Pressure for (perceived) innovation is one of the things that drives bad patents. Removing this pressure has positive consequences (in addition to the negative consequence of potentially novel IP not being protected in time--but is that actually a bad thing? I don't know). There's a parallel also in the world of academic paper publishing--the pressure for constantly innovating and publishing is a major reason for bad publications. I am speaking anecdotally, from my experience as a past PhD student and a current young professional in the research industry.
- majormajor 4y ago
  How would the examiners be able to turn "limited time" into incentive to create "innovation in tools" [that they themselves aren't the ones building]? Old orgs with old tools aren't improved by putting more pressure just on the users of those tools.
OisinMoran 4y ago
You are right that a transition to the cloud is not going to help. Bad software will still be bad in the cloud, good software can be just as good (and often better on several axes) when not in the cloud. Though from reading some of the complaints in the thread you link here, Amazon does have very good OCR software (called Textract), so that could help. But on this point: > And while search technology has improved, it hasn't become orders of magnitude better. In general it has, it is just that the USPTO's software hasn't. I imagine a team of the right 2-5 people could make something better than you would wish for in your wildest dreams. But how to actually make that happen is another kettle of fish. Anyone capable of fixing this would most likely be better remunerated doing something else, but nerds are easy to snipe and even just reading your gripes here and in the subreddit has made me want to solve this problem if for no other reason than the humanitarian one.
- btrettel 4y ago
  > In general it has, it is just that the USPTO's software hasn't. On the contrary, USPTO's internal search tool (PE2E Search) is overall good and has many features that I wish public search engines like Google had. The main difference is that it's designed for power searchers, not the general public. Yes, PE2E Search has a lot of issues, but the USPTO contractor who commented here has probably never used it to search for patents and thus has no basis for comparison. You should take what they said with that caveat in mind. My basic point is that no existing search technology makes up for the sheer increase in documents to search. The last significant innovation in patent search was switching to computerized search in the 90s. The changes since then have been relatively minor, but the number of documents to search since then has increased dramatically. Maybe some AI based search will eventually be a game changer, but for now it's not (I've tried 5+ AI search tools and they usually aren't good) and I don't see that changing any time soon. Also see these other comments I made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33509535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33509535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33506241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33506241 (Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)

nostrebored 4y ago

But wouldn’t doubling the time reduce pressure for innovation here?

mikewarot 4y ago
Improving the time/quality of examination would reduce the number of bad patents, and thus raise the bar for something to get patented, requiring MORE actual innovation, and less fake process based crap.
Naracion 4y ago
Pressure for (perceived) innovation is one of the things that drives bad patents. Removing this pressure has positive consequences (in addition to the negative consequence of potentially novel IP not being protected in time--but is that actually a bad thing? I don't know). There's a parallel also in the world of academic paper publishing--the pressure for constantly innovating and publishing is a major reason for bad publications. I am speaking anecdotally, from my experience as a past PhD student and a current young professional in the research industry.
majormajor 4y ago
How would the examiners be able to turn "limited time" into incentive to create "innovation in tools" [that they themselves aren't the ones building]? Old orgs with old tools aren't improved by putting more pressure just on the users of those tools.

OisinMoran 4y ago

You are right that a transition to the cloud is not going to help. Bad software will still be bad in the cloud, good software can be just as good (and often better on several axes) when not in the cloud. Though from reading some of the complaints in the thread you link here, Amazon does have very good OCR software (called Textract), so that could help. But on this point: > And while search technology has improved, it hasn't become orders of magnitude better. In general it has, it is just that the USPTO's software hasn't. I imagine a team of the right 2-5 people could make something better than you would wish for in your wildest dreams. But how to actually make that happen is another kettle of fish. Anyone capable of fixing this would most likely be better remunerated doing something else, but nerds are easy to snipe and even just reading your gripes here and in the subreddit has made me want to solve this problem if for no other reason than the humanitarian one.

btrettel 4y ago
> In general it has, it is just that the USPTO's software hasn't. On the contrary, USPTO's internal search tool (PE2E Search) is overall good and has many features that I wish public search engines like Google had. The main difference is that it's designed for power searchers, not the general public. Yes, PE2E Search has a lot of issues, but the USPTO contractor who commented here has probably never used it to search for patents and thus has no basis for comparison. You should take what they said with that caveat in mind. My basic point is that no existing search technology makes up for the sheer increase in documents to search. The last significant innovation in patent search was switching to computerized search in the 90s. The changes since then have been relatively minor, but the number of documents to search since then has increased dramatically. Maybe some AI based search will eventually be a game changer, but for now it's not (I've tried 5+ AI search tools and they usually aren't good) and I don't see that changing any time soon. Also see these other comments I made: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33509535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33509535 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33506241 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33506241 (Again, like my other comments here, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US government.)