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> Cloudflare is shrewdly calculating that there is a lot of latent, unexpressed hate toward patent trolls but that most people don't want to make a career out o
by btrettel 2y ago
> Cloudflare is shrewdly calculating that there is a lot of latent, unexpressed hate toward patent trolls but that most people don't want to make a career out of it, but might very well make a little hobby out of it, and so they get to take advantage of people who are motivated by something other than money.
I don't think this is a good strategy. These folks tend to have a poor understanding of patent law in my experience, and you need to understand the basics to do this right. (You fortunately don't need to know too much law to handle 90% of cases.) And these folks probably aren't very effective at patent searching even if they understand the legal parts. I think most people overestimate their own search abilities. I certainly did. Examining patents didn't level me up as much as humble me in that regard.
> More deeply, the very idea of a "patent examiner" has never made sense to me. It require being expert in all things, which is impossible. [...]
As saratogacx pointed out, at the USPTO, the vast majority of examiners have a specific technology they are assigned to. While the matching of examiners to their "art unit" is often pretty bad (I could go on a rant...), the situation is not as bad as you described. There are some generalist examiners, but as I understand it, they are in (basically) QA roles and don't need to know the technologies as much. Unfortunately, USPTO upper management seems to want to make examiners into generalists, which I doubt will work out as they want.
I agree that periodic rotations of industry folks into patent examiner positions is a great idea. It would help the patent system and give the industry folks some appreciation for what examiners do.
If you're worried about lack of expertise, you should be more worried about the courts. Judges and juries almost never have a background in the technology of the case they are working on.
- the_gorilla 2y ago>It would help the patent system and give the industry folks some appreciation for what examiners do. The examiners regularly approve absolute bullshit patents in my field that either obviously have prior work, and shouldn't be patentable anyway such as game mechanics. They clearly don't understand the work they're meant to be doing. Either patent law is horribly designed and needs to be razed to the ground, or it's being horribly applied.
- btrettel 2y agoIf you go to a hospital that lacks the resources to provide proper treatment, should you be surprised to receive poor treatment even if your doctor was highly competent? That's basically the situation the USPTO is in. Examiners are on a quota system and they don't get enough time to do a good quality job. With that being said, the majority of the time, the examiner made the right decision. You should check whether a patent was actually granted, for instance. Often when people are complaining about a dumb patent they're actually complaining about a dumb patent application that the USPTO rightly rejected. You should be complaining about the people writing such applications, not the USPTO. Further, the USPTO is funded purely by fees, not taxes. Applicants want patents. That creates a perverse incentive to reduce patent quality to make it easier to get patents. I've elaborated on these issues at length on HN before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563611 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36563611
- the_gorilla 2y ago>If you go to a hospital that lacks the resources to provide proper treatment I don't have the energy to diffuse false analogies. We're not talking about a hospital.
- lostdog 2y agoThe parent clearly said that approved parents were bullshit, and I agree. I have several patents, and have seen how nonsense the process is. When lawyers obfuscate the text enough to confuse the patent examiner, the patent gets approved. I can't tell if an individual patent examiner is competent or knowledgeable, but patent decisions have nothing to do with factuality or novelty. I do remember your comments from past threads too. It really interesting to hear the perspective from the patent office's side, but the idea that the patent office had some secret and specialized method of evaluating novelty is ridiculous. Any expert can read a sample of granted patents and tell you that. I'd estimate maybe 5% of patents in my field have any novelty, and that's being generous. I'm sure this has more to do with incentives and the overall system, and that individual patent examiners would prefer to do a good job. But you have to admit that the results are atrocious.
- eastdakota 2y agoProof is in the pudding, as they say. I've been astonished by the quality of the submissions we've received the times we've fired up Project Jengo. And it's helped us successfully beat — and literally put out of business — the two patent trolls that have come after us.
- btrettel 2y agoDid you all pay for a normal invalidation search as well? I'm glad it worked for you all, but I think "spray and pray" is typically not a good strategy. I suppose you all had enough scale to reach the right people.
- eastdakota 2y agoI’m sorry we’ve shown that going to law school is less valuable than some may have thought. My parents had that angst too when I decided not to practice law after going to law school myself. It worked out.
- Digit-Al 2y agoThe proof is not in the pudding. The proof of the pudding is in the eating.