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Comment by vibrunazo | Hacker News Reader

But does invalidating a patent usually work well a intended? We see so many obviously ridiculous patents, that one might think that if they are so sloppy to approve patents on the first place, that they'll be just as sloppy in a re examination.

Or is the re examination all that much rigorous and accurate?

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> "We see so many obviously ridiculous patents"

Many -- if not most -- of the patents that the community is quick to decry as "obviously ridiculous" only appear so if you misunderstand how patents work. [1]

The US Patent Office has granted millions of patents and reviewed millions more applications in the fairly brief life of computer/systems/process patents. The few dozen legitimately bad patents hardly justify an accusation of sloppiness.

We would all be positively blessed if every bureaucratic system had such a low failure rate.

That all said: Yes, the system obviously needs work. But the performance of patent examiners isn't that primary a concern to anyone who's taken a good look at the system and it's problems.

[1] All that matters are the claims. The descriptions are irrelevant to the meat of what, specifically was being patented. The community has a long history of loudly complaining about descriptions that define an absurdly general invention, when the claims, in fact, indicate a narrowly defined patent of at least arguable value.

My impression is the opposite. Patent cases one hears about seem to start with 137 patents, and the judge throws out all but a few claims of 2. Perhaps this is self-selecting, but the impression is that most of the patents granted are, in fact, bogus.

What you seem to be talking about are infringement suits where the judge throws out consideration of large numbers of patents and claims. That's about whittling down a problem of mind-boggling complexity to a group of questions that can be understood and answered in a reasonable amount of time. Those patents and claims aren't being struck down or ruled 'bogus'. They're just being ruled irrelevant to the meat of the case, to simplify the proceedings.

And most claims are thrown out of consideration simply because most patents only include a few independent claims. And as a practical matter if you can rule out infringement of an independent claim you've ruled out any possibility of infringement of its dependent claims.

I find the Google-Oracle case to be a great example of the bogusness of most patents. They started with hundreds of patents. Then the judge told Oracle to pick their "best five". You would think that if told to pick the best 5 out of hundreds that those at least would be solid. Yet Google has managed to get several of the 5 invalidated...

Do you really believe that there are only a few dozen bad computer/systems/process patents?

That sounds wildly optimistic.

I believe that only a few dozen computer/systems/process patents are causing trouble because of reasons that could be arguably attributed to 'sloppiness' on the part of the examiner. That is: too-broad patents, patents granted despite prior art, etc.

I'm not counting any undesirable patents that are causing problems because patent terms are too long, or those that were granted because patent law/precedent/policy didn't give the examiner any cause to reject it, etc.

My point is only to refute the charge that examiners 'sloppiness' is common and/or a notable problem.

is certainly an incredibly expensive problem, even in single cases;

http://www.space-travel.com/reports/Boeing_Patent_Shuts_Down...

And I am pretty sure, even ignoring broadness as a factor and just sticking to patents granted despite prior art, that if there were only a few dozen patents causing trouble then the companies like Article One, who is getting patents revoked in the hundreds due to discovery of prior art, would not be able to exist while paying out millions in discovery fees to their researchers.

[edit] - a look at the problem of workload by a USPTO Patent Examiner;

http://just-n-examiner.livejournal.com/44737.html

There's something like a million pending patents backing up the system. I think their attitude is "screw it, just approve everything, and let the courts sort it out". If you call for a re-examination, they might think twice, because they'll look bad if the courts suggest they screwed up.

Could you automate a patent troll using a variation on the SCIgen software and effectively ddos the entire patent office with nonsensical gibberish?

Am I bad for thinking of such things? ;)

No, but you can write nonsense claims (stuff that's obviously way too broad, and already in common use, or just plain silly) and publicize it if they are accepted.

I guess the problem is you need to pay a significant amount of money to file a claim. Interestingly, some have advocated the same method for preventing spam in email by requiring you to pay a very small amount every time you send one.

Yes, that's one of the oldest and most useless proposals that gets brought up by at least 5 people in every single discussion of email spam...

Which just happened to work well for the closest thing email has to a replacement. Text Messages. Think about this for a second, just about anyone can send you a text at any time using your public phone number yet it's not a problem.

Not a problem? Google for "text message spam".

Now think a second about the useful things emails are used for which text messages generally can't be: notifications for new releases of OSS projects or replies to a blog comment, mailing lists for OSS developers or hobbies...

I think you might actually be able to make some money with a program that searched expired computer-related patents for ideas which could be repatented for mobile devices instead of computers in general.

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