-- [Patents] Re: BT and Hyperlink patent

[Ram'on Garc'ia Fern'andez ramon@jl1.quim.ucm.es]

> So let's get the patent offices to improve the quality of their
> examination operations.

I do not think that the faults of the patent offices are the most
important problem.

Let me insist that you are not correct in the reading of the law and
the work of the patent offices.

The law does not say that for an invention to be patentable it must be
*difficult*; or it must cost a lot of research work. It never says
that. Easy inventions are *legally patentable* inventions. In
particular, the finding of the solution to a programming problem in
one day is legally patentable, as much as a medicine that has taken
five years of research.

In addition to law, the US Patent Office has a philosophy when his
examiners interpret the law. And that philosophy is that if you invent
something, however simple or easy, you should be granted a
patent. Thus, for them obvious means something as transparent as
water. This is a quotation of Todd Dickinson, head of the USPTO, during
a debate with Tim O'Reilly:

From
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/patents/2000/10/23/isoc.html?page=2

I brought one today that was issued by the U.S. Patent Office in
1867. And, it is a hotel registry book. This is the entire claim: "A
hotel registry book with the margin of its leaves occupied by
advertisements" substantially as described in that drawing, which
looks suspiciously like, if you turned your browser to the right too
long today and went to a commercial site, what you'd find.

See? To him, the web pages of a commercial site are "imitating" that
patent. For him, placing ads in the margins of a web page is a patentable
method. It is an original idea. If I did not hear about it, maybe I
did not know it. So it is not obvious.

Ramon