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Comment by tightbookkeeper | Hacker News Reader

- Documenting and classifying inventions is valuable - people choose to become a patent clerk/lawyer because of the stability. It enables them to take care of family, pursue hobbies, etc (see Einstein). - the alternative for some is being an engineer but for others it might be a librarian

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Patents are close to completely useless as a form of documentation. It's not valuable.

You may be thinking about old patents where people wrote real engineering information with real details on them that excluded non-working alternatives. Patents are not like that anymore.

Then that sounds like a management problem, not a fundamental problem with the concept of patent lawyers and clerks which this poster claimed was a “brain drain”.

It's absolutely a patent review problem. It's probably not caused by individual clerks, as each one of them can't cause something like this alone, but it shows on their work.

Patents have an inherent tension between being as explicit as possible, and leaving enough generality so that it's not trivial to infringe. It's not supposed to be an exact recipe.

The latter points are valid, but for the first - software engineers are usually best advised not to spend time looking at the patent database. For a long time (is it still true?) there were triple damages for knowingly infringing a parent, and in any case the function of the patent database as a publication of ideas is extremely small in software. I have literally not heard of anyone locating something they need to implement by looking at it.

Working engineers are not the only audience.

No, but property rights in inventions are supposedly justified by the idea that this publishing will enable implementations when the patent expires. In the software world that means engineers. I don't know what audience you have in mind?

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