Re: [Patents] How to provide prior art info?

[Roland Orre <orre@nada.kth.se>]

On Sat, 2003-07-05 at 15:22, Alec Clelland wrote:
Roland Orre:
> > As Greg mentioned for instance Star Trek, concerning my mistake about
> > the MS application on an instant translator, how likely is it that the
> > examiners will search through SF publications? (I know this happened
> > for the communication satellite which was rejected because Arthur C
> > Clarke had already published about it)
> >
Alec Clelland:
> Many, many years ago, when I was a young examiner, a well-known mobile phone
> company filed a patent application for a cellphone which could be folded in
> half - the kind of design which is standard today. I cited a Star Trek
> communicator. But the principal examiner didn't like the references to "beam
> me up Scottie" and to an apparatus being "invented in about 400 years time".

Roland Orre:
OK, for my own I would consider a reference to a teleporter to be quite
far sighted concerning that the original application only was an obvious
step in miniaturization engineering. A patent can not be granted on
obvious reasons, it has to contain some innovative step, and not just
being an application of ordinary design or engineering reasoning.

The idea about the teleporter as such can not be patented due to your
reference. But a foldable cellphone.., I guess that it was merely
considered a joke. But anyway, I don't imagine the patent was granted
anyway, of earlier mentioned obvious reasons.

When concerning teleporters, there are many possible technologies, still
not implemented, which may solve the problem of teleportation (if we
ignore certain metaphysical concerns) I can imagine several details of
these technologies to be patentable, but of course not the general
methodology or idea about teleportation.

Roland:
> > (I also have the feeling, that, certain examiners, due to a potential
> > economical gain in granting a patent, despite how obvious it is, may
> > not search very thoroughly...)

Alec Clelland:
> No. In my (admittedly ancient) experience there is considerable intellectual
> satisfaction in finding relevant prior art.

Well, unfortunately it seems to be an ancient experience... How could
otherwise e.g. a patent (just an example) like EP 266049, which is quite
similar to normal Hoffman coding (also completely illegal patent due to
article 52 EPC) be granted?

On this subject there are tremendous amounts of granted patents, by e.g.
EPO which are either completely obvious or where there are tremendous
amounts of prior art. (Like the recent patent claims of a student data
base in GB for instance)

        Roland Orre