Reforming the patent system to support American innovation | Hacker News Reader

Reforming the patent system to support American innovation

blog.google

22 pointskjhughes9 comments

As I've said in quite a few comments here lately, I'm a former patent examiner.

I like how Google lists "Investing in the Patent Office" as their first proposed solution. But here they seem to refer to adding new search technologies, including "AI solutions". New search technologies are not likely to help in my view. The USPTO already has quite a few AI-based search tools at their disposal, and they aren't game-changers. I wrote a bit about why the existing AI-based patent search tools don't work that well here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31113496

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30978043

Later the writer says "The PTO is funded by fees paid by patent applicants, and we support increasing fees for the largest patent filers, including Google". That's more of what would actually help improve patent quality. But it would only help if examiners are given more time, which the blog post doesn't discuss. Just giving the USPTO more money alone won't necessarily change anything. I can recall attorneys complaining that when they pay extra to have extra patent claims, the examiner doesn't get any more time to examine the extra claims. So what are the extra fees actually doing? (Now an examiner gets an extra hour if their application has more than a certain number of claims... which is an increase of less than 10% time for more than 10% more work, but better than nothing I guess.)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31197809

The per-patent time budget figure I happened on a couple of years ago was 14 hours, without reference to number of claims. Does that sound like the old policy, or perhaps an over-simplification?

That's probably an average figure as of 5 or more years ago. The number varies depending on the patent classification and pay grade. (Higher pay grade means you get less time.) I don't know what the average across the entire USPTO was, but as a new examiner I frequently had an "expectancy" (the name for the number you quoted) of around 20-25 hours. And as I said, getting a ton of extra claims only got me 1 more hour. (Typical US patent applications have 20 claims. I once had an application with 45 claims that other examiners kept transferring around because they didn't want to work on it... I had to work on that one and it was a huge waste of my time. The attorney basically used the shotgun approach to claims drafting, hoping that one claim would get through, but none did.)

And keep in mind that's for only a certain amount of examination. The first "office action" (response to the application) gets 62.5% of that time, and subsequent actions get a different (smaller) fraction of that time.

US patent no 7,415,666, granted August 19, 2008.

Title: Method and system for navigating paginated content in page-based increments

https://wiki.endsoftwarepatents.org/wiki/Example_software_pa...

https://endsoftwarepatents.org/

I'm really grateful to Google for their work on patents in its first 10-15 years and am glad to see those efforts continuint.

Isn’t google kinda a patent troll?

Google is just mad they can no longer steal startups/competitors IP. See Sonos v Google at the ITC.

There’s a grain of truth in there.

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