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Comment by LVB | Hacker News Reader

I was skimming over the claims of the patent. Starting at claim 23, they basically go on to claim all sorts of behavior commonly seen in podcast players, e.g.:

The audio program player set forth in claim 23 wherein said display screen displays the displayable text describing said particular audio recording file when said particular audio recording file is being reproduced.

I really don't understand how the USPTO approves claims filed in 2009 that describe concepts which were in peoples hands for the preceding five years. Perhaps those will be the first claims invalidated, but it just further highlights the mind-boggling logic of the USPTO.

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The worst part is, as far as I understand it, the person who let this go through is simply not going to be reprimanded or face any consequence whatsoever.

Why should they? Its the responsibility of USPTO to ensure its agents are acting appropriately by following the rules and standards they set out. Unless the person responsible was doing something malicious, I don't see why they should be reprimanded.

They should be reprimanded because they will end up causing billions of dollars in legal fees over patents that should never have existed in the first place. Do you understand the collateral damage that approving frivolous patents causes?

So poor quality work should be treated the same as high quality work, in the eyes of the USPTO, then?

Part of the problem (as I understand it) is that when patent examiners reject a patent application, they are required to give a reason from an approved list of rejection reasons. The "this already exists" reason requires the examiner to cite some sort of approved publication which describes the invention. Unfortunately, the list of approved publications is essentially "existing patents and nothing else." The patent office recently (less than a year ago) started a wiki to allow experts in certain fields to document the state of the art in that field.

Another part of the problem is that patent examiners are required to examine X number of patents per unit time. Unfortunately, when a patent applicant resubmits a rejected application, the patent examiner does not get credit for examining the patent a second time. So an applicant can troll the patent examiner by repeatedly modifying the application. The examiner becomes so overwhelmed with resubmitted applications that he or she has no choice but to approve the application in order to meet quota.

The result of these rules is that a patent examiner effectively can't reject a patent application unless someone has already tried to patent the exact same thing. Or, "blame the game, not the player."

> Unfortunately, the list of approved publications is essentially "existing patents and nothing else."

This is exactly it. It sounds like a joke, but the USPTO's definition of "non-obvious" actually boils down to "isn't already patented". (Allegedly -- I admit this is hearsay, and I hope it is just some joke.)

The mere fact that something like this can be patented is the clearer indication of how broken the whole system is.

Basically what is patented here is the displaying of some information on a screen. How on earth can something like that be considered a patent?

No, that is not "basically" what is patented here. You have to read the whole claim. And if a claim refers back to an earlier claim as a dependent ("the apparatus of claim x, further comprising...") then it also incorporates all of the limitations of that earlier claim.

Then what is being patented here? You're guilty of the same vacuous response you accuse elorant of.

Mine was at least correct though. Posting from my phone, so you'll excuse me for not trying to parse out the claims.

Fair enough :)

The claim you quoted also requires all the limitations of claim 23. I haven't looked at those (on my phone at the moment), but just quoting a dependent claim without its independent is meaningless.

The US is first-to-invent, so invention date matters, not (necessarily/entirely) filing date. And this patent is a divisional application of a divisional application off an original filing in 1996. So this filing is considered in the context of the state of the art of 1996.

US if first-to-file since last year with the America Invents Act, aka the "patent reform".

The first-to-file provisions (among others) don't actually go into effect until March 16th of this year. (The 16th being a Saturday, filings will have to be in by the 15th to be considered under first-to-invent.)

But then the patent expiration clock starts now, rather than from 1996? That seems so wrong. That would mean the patent backlog is actually working for the trolls.

Nah, expiration is 20 years from the earliest priority date. So if they're claiming 1996, the patent will expire in 2016.

The backlog used to be problematic along the lines you're thinking, but they adjusted the rules in 1995.

The USPTO does no prior art checking, especially in software. You could patent simple logic gates... today.

This isn't true, I've filed and been granted a number of patents on various things and in nearly every one there was a response from the PTO about things they considered to be prior art. Granted sometimes their searches were poorly done (word matching for example) but generally there was some prior art checking.

Yep. It's not that they don't consider prior art at all. It's just that an exhaustive search for priort art is not possible, and all it takes is one overworked patent clerk to let something like this slip by. It's possible that this is a valid patent based on whatever criteria the patent office uses for software patents.

The problem is that the criteria is terrible for validating software patents. I don't even believe any criteria for validating software patents would actually encourage innovation in software.

Spoken like someone who truly has zero experience with the USPTO.

No, they definitely do check for prior art.

The problem, as I understand it, is that they don't cast their net all that widely, and how they do cast their net doesn't really correspond very well with the way most informed people think about such issues.

In all the cases I've seen, they've cited other patents as evidence of prior art, where the other patent is pretty obviously similar (lots of the same keywords etc). On the other hand, stuff that's so incredibly obvious and widespread that nobody never even considered patenting it before might get through easily, 'cause you know, no prior patents... ><

[I have a Japanese patent, and an attempt to get the same patent in the US was rejected by the USPTO (after years of back-and-forth...) because of prior US patents.]

did you not see the "compilation file" elements?

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