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Comment by Calavar | Hacker News Reader

> company B should get MAJOR financial rewards from BOTH company A and the patent office, on the order of 10x+ what they spent on their defence

By "the patent office" you mean taxpayers, right? Because we're the ones who foot the bill for any judgement against the government. I can't see any situation where individual patent clerks would be held accountable. First, it goes against established case law regarding civil cases against federal employees [1, 2]. Second, if you amend the law so that patent clerks are an exception and can be held individually liable for potentially tens of millions of dollars, only absolute idiots would agree to take that job.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/jm/civil-resource-manual-33-immunity...

[2] https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/personal...

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The idea would be for the patent office to get $I dollars funding from tax payers, from which they payouts are made when errors are made. If they flub it year after year they'd be forced into process improvements or a huge fight with Congress. Basically, as soon as control becomes separated from accountability, one organizationally hit into these problems.

Another analogy: I'm sort of against housing brokers passing the mortgage onto Fannie Mae. By the time the government finds out something is wrong, it may be too late to "untake" the property. Brokers have short-term control goals and short term risk profile. They stick somebody else with the long term disk, while they're still paid. It's a misalignment.

A further analogy: the beatings will continue until morale improves.

> By "the patent office" you mean taxpayers, right? Because we're the ones who foot the bill for any judgement against the government.

I think they meant the patent office should cover that from fees, not from taxpayers.

Then the fees would be so high only the biggest companies could afford to file patents.

That doesn't really help because money is fungible.

In a city near me the taxpayers recently rejected a tax increase to pay for a bond because they were grumpy that the government took out the bond without asking them first. The city was still on the hook for the bond, so they just siphoned money from the roads fund.

The same thing would happen here—you can say that the judgment must come from fees, but then the patent office will have to either raise fees to crazy levels in order to cover the risk (thus making patents even more of a large company advantage) or they'll siphon money from things that were being covered by fees and use taxpayer dollars to cover those things.

I believe that patent office budget is mostly fees.

> By "the patent office" you mean taxpayers, right?

Now THAT would be a use of my tax dollars I could actually get behind.

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