[Patents] monopoly/publicity contradiction?

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

On Wed, Dec 20, 2000 at 01:48:18PM -0500, Gregory Aharonian wrote:
> >The problem with stupid software patents is not the examination process.
> >Are you convinced now that the problem of easy/stupid patents is not
> >with the examiners, and that the problem is in the law?
> 
> No.  I have little appreciate of what goes on inside the UK Patent
> Office, but I do know that if US patent examiners had more time,
> money and resources to do their searching and analysis, that most
> of the stupid/bad software patents (and stupid/bad patents in other
> fields) would not issue.  The law is fine 

> all that is needed to get rid of most of the crap issuing, is to
> provide examiners with more resources to do their jobs - to help the
> find prior art that allows them to kill stupid/bad patents on the
> easier rejection grounds of novelty.

More resources can help to the problem of prior art. But the problem
of obvious/easy patents is simply that they are legal, depending of
the exact meaning of the word obvious. Let us see some words from
the head of the US Patent Office, Todd Dickinson:

>  They [the Court of Appeals of the Federal Circuit] also ratified or
>  validated the software examination guidelines which our office had
>  promulgated a few years before and said those were a valid means
>  for examining software patents.

So all the US Patent Office is doing is to obey the law, and the
precedent of the courts. Both the law and courts say that those
patents that you call "stupid" are valid for them. More:

>  The second thing we've done was provide both training with them on
>  the state of the art and an understanding of where we have databases
>  and where we don't have databases that can be searched. We spend
>  about $12 million a year on external databases and we have a very
>  broad collection of our own, but we're also and always eager to get
>  more. The second thing we did was what we called the Second Look. In
>  this class we had now a primary level examiner or higher take a
>  second look at all those patent applications before they went to
>  issue and many of them have now been turned back. [...]

>  Third, we're requiring the examiners to use the automated search
>  tools. This is the only area where we make that requirement. Most of
>  them do, but our union has been negotiating this point for quite some
>  time. [...]

The US Patent Office is doing a reasonable effort in prior art.

Remember, Greg, that we are talking about law. "Easy" and "obvious"
are very different words from a legal perspective.

Ramon