From notobvious@hotmail.com  Sun Nov 26 10:41:34 2000
Date: Sun, 26 Nov 2000 10:41:34 -0000
From: John Smith notobvious@hotmail.com
Subject: [Patents] (no subject)

Edward Avis wrote:-
>
>I don't doubt that many of them are competent, but there must be a
>significant number who are not.  How else can you explain the patents
>exhibited in the swpat horror gallery?
>
>I defy you to pick one of these patents and say with a straight face
>that the examiner who granted it was competent at his job.

The problem is always the prior art. Patent examiners are good at examining 
mechanical widgets not because they find them easier than software but 
because patent offices have been examining widgets for generations and know 
how to classify them.

Right now, despite protestations to the contrary, the EPO just isn't very 
good at searching software patents because it hasn't worked out a 
satisfactory classification for search purposes. I remember years ago in the 
UK Patent Office seeing how the group dealing with systems (group 40 if I 
remember rightly) would redraw inventions in flow chart form to try and get 
some kind of system into the searching. They failed.

It will take a generation or two to sort out this problem. In the meantime, 
tough luck and remember the opposition and third-party intervention 
procedures which almost all countries (the US, of course, excepted) provide.

The examiners are pretty sharp in my experience - I agree with Greg.

As for "technicity", Hartmut accuses Greg of evading the point, but isn't it 
just a little bit too easy to keep coming back to a specifically GERMAN 
definition, made at a date when the problem of software had not yet arisen?.

"Technical" is a wonderful word. Nobody knows what it means and most people 
don't want a watertight definition. To quote Willie (Lord) Aldous, "I have 
great difficulty in understanding what 'technical' means". Courts, by the 
way (except some German courts who should know better) are usually very 
careful to avoid definitions which might make a rod for their own backs. 
This isn't just true in patents.

"notobvious"
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