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Comment by kilburn | Hacker News Reader

I am a bit surprised that most comments here focus on whether the guy's genuine or not.

What surprised me, in a bad way, is that to challenge a patent you have to have 6k USD to throw away plus the expertise and time (which the article estimates at 60k USD).

IMHO, if the patent ends up overturned, the patent holder should be liable for those costs. In fact, I can't think of any reason why it shouldn't be that way. Can you?

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USPTO acts as the gate. If a patent is overturned, in theory the USPTO should be the institution paying for their diligence failure.

Up until the patent is issued, all costs are on the applicant. Why should the costs of an error by a regulator also be on the requestor?

Maybe because then you could pick on small patents that a competitor isn't really using to hit them for 6k/60k a pop? Of course, that would only work if they have several dodgy patents, so you argue they should just be more careful.

Disclaimer: I'm just speculating and know nothing about patent law.

Why is the US Patent Office not liable for these obviously bad patent grants?

I think this patent mess ends when the Patent Office isn't self funded and thus doesn't have the perverse incentive to grant as many patents as possible.

If the patent office is liable it can still be self-funded and not have an incentive to grant as many patents as it can. Make the liability some multiple of what they charge for the filling and there you go. Vary the multiple as needed to increase/decrease how careful you want them to be (leading to less patent grants overall)

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