Posts Tagged: "paul dougherty"

Surprisingly Short Patent Claims in Published Applications

But there are no doubt some bizarre patent applications that have published over the years, such as a method of walking through walls like a ghost. See Knowing When You Have Too Much Time on Your Hands. So you never know quite what you will get with a patent application, although the jokesters are typically kept at a minimum given the expense of filing a patent application… The real problem is that the failure to include claims or realistic breadth means that there will be no meaningful examination provided by the examiner in the first of two substantives reviews. If such obviously overbroad claims are the ones that are in the file at the time of first examination it will be virtually impossible to obtain a patent without at least one, perhaps multiple, additional filings and amendments, all of which cost time and money for the inventor/applicant. The old saying “garbage in, garbage out” comes to mind.

The Patent Box: Searchable Image File Wrapper Documents

IFW Insight is a web-based application for searching, sharing and collaborating on US Patent Image File Wrapper (IFW) documents, which are also commonly referred to as “File History” documents. The IFW Insight search interface includes powerful search features including support for both proximity and Boolean search operations. The IFW Insight database currently includes over 1,000 IFW documents. IFWs are created by the USPTO as image-based documents, and are thus not searchable. Notwithstanding, by applying proprietary optical character recognition (OCR) algorithms The Patent Box is able to expose text data embedded within these image-based documents, thereby making them fully searchable.