Posts Tagged: "patent examiners"

Negating Hindsight Reconstruction: A Logical Framework

It is well known that hindsight reconstruction is an insidious error that infects patent prosecution. The Federal Circuit has noted that it is a difficult task to avoid “subconscious reliance on hindsight” and tools are available to “inoculate the obviousness analysis against hindsight”. However, it is well known that practitioners could benefit in countering the pernicious problem of subconscious hindsight directed analysis with additional tools. This article is intended to provide an additional tool outlining a new analytical approach to detecting hindsight: 1) identification of a proxy problem upon which an “obvious” advantage is predicated, and 2) showing that either a) the proxy problem is secondary to the problem solved by the inventor and would have been insufficient to drive advancement of the art, and that the examiner has failed to show that a person of ordinary skill in the art (POSITA) would have regarded the proxy problem as sufficiently significant so as to require solution, or b) a showing that the proxy problem posed to POSITA presupposes the problem and its solution as solved by the inventor and is derivative. Once it is shown that the proxy problem is subsidiary or presupposes the problem solved by the inventor it becomes a less difficult task to show that the invention was not considered as a whole or that the problem was improperly phrased.

The China Syndrome: How recent developments in Chinese patents affect U.S. applicants

Chinese patents and patent applications are citable as prior art in most Western countries if they meet the usual criteria regarding publication dates of the cited patent and filing or priority dates of the examined patent. They always have been. However, recent developments have made them more problematic for Western country applicants, especially for independent inventors and small businesses… While in the past an inventor may have decided that it was not worth getting a patent, and many inventions have been forgotten in this manner, there is a large number of people in China who are now encouraged to file patents applications and utility model applications even for the simplest of invention. What we can do as patent agents and attorneys, is to start searching for Chinese documents when doing prior art searches. This may result in bad news for inventors who receive negative patentability reports, but at least they will not spend a lot of money only to have their patent application rejected later.

How NOT to Respond to an Office Action

On September 19, 2016, a pro-se inventor filed an Office Action Response that will go down in the annals of Patent Office history right up there with the Are You Drunk Examiner? response filed several years ago. Whatever one might think of patent examination quality, there is absolutely no call for using foul language to berate examiners in an Office Action Response. It is one thing to point out that it seems clear that an examiner has not read what the applicant has submitted, but it is quite another to call the examiner and the examiner’s supervisor a… There are patent examiners that can and do inspire this level of venomous hatred. Whatever the wrong perpetrated by the examiner ceases to matter, however, when a response like this is filed.

The Inspector General’s Report Alleging PTO Examiner Time and Attendance Abuse Has No Merit

On August 31, 2016, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the U.S. Department of Commerce (DOC) released a report titled Investigative Report on Analysis of Patent Examiners’ Time and Attendance, (the Report). The Report lacks a sound statistical basis for its conclusions and recommendations. It should be withdrawn and its errors corrected before further dissemination. Otherwise, the OIG’s credibility will be irreparably damaged and it will deserve not to be taken seriously by the public, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (PTO), or other DOC operating units.

Hearing on Examiner Fraud a Big, Fat Nothing Burger

Prepared statements released in advance of the hearing talked tough, but that was pretty much it. Insofar as getting to the root of the problems identified in the IG report the hearing turned out to be a big, fat nothing burger. I guess when the fraud is only 2% of the hours worked that is seen as a moral victory and a sign of good government. Perhaps 2% fraud in government is the best we can expect, but if you dig even one fraction of a level deeper within the IG report you will notice that almost 45% of those hours characterized as fraudulent were claimed by fewer than 5% of patent examiners. How is it possible that less than 5% of patent examiners accounted for nearly half of the fraudulent hours identified by the Inspector General? If there are valid reasons that the many hard working, conscientious examiners might be working and not logged in then why are so many of these questionable hours disproportionately being claimed by only a small number of patent examiners?