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Comment by Roboprog | Hacker News Reader

Sooooo.... The US Patent office doesn't have an internet connection???

The irony is that I did a Google search last night for emulators for my tablet, and found, shall we say, just a bit of prior art.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_emulators#Ni...

How can the Patent Office be immune to their seemingly utter incompetence? (or am I pulling a "reverse Hanlon's Razor" here - ascribing to stupidity what is really evil)

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1. This is merely a published patent application, and not an issued patent. An inventor may file a patent application that claims whatever he/she wants. An application has no legal effect until it has been examined and issued by the USPTO.

2. This particular patent application claims priority to a patent application filed on November 28, 2000. This means that any prior art must have been published before that date. It does not appear that your links contains any such prior art.

I know it is quite popular on the Internet to criticize the USPTO for its perceived "incompetence", but please make sure that you have the "competence" of understanding the basics of the US patent application process before making disparaging remarks.

Thanks for this clarification. The TechCrunch title was obviously misleading, so we changed it.

Edit: we also changed the url from http://techcrunch.com/2014/11/28/nintendo-patents-game-boy-e... to a more substantive article that it points to.

Yeah, I get the distinction between "applied" and "granted". The old link had less information, without further searching around for the casual reader. The fact that 16 out of 17 claims had been mentioned as invalidated, but still leaving one remaining, was suggestive of part of the patent being granted.

Are you claiming the USPO doesn't grant overreaching patents, by the dozen?

The "prior to 2000" part is interesting, though. I wonder who filed what patent in 2000 about emulating old bitty boxes?

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