On 19/09/2011 15:21, Stefan Schreiber wrote:
Dave Malham wrote:
Well, like I said, I do apologise - it was an unfortunate attempt at a humorous dig at the system
and the fact that patent examiners, who are generally overworked and underpaid, often end up
being forced to take on patents which are not really in their sphere of expertise due to pressure
of work (one of the Uni's Patent Agent's told me that the US patent office typically allocates
less than 20 minutes per application - true or not, it gives some indication of the scale of the
problem)
This can't be true, because < my > (US) examiner wrote 20+ pages in the first reaction I got, and
they were very elaborated.
Secondly, she presented a quite big list of related documents. Therefore, she had spent a
considerable amount of time in the evaluation of application, and for technical "recherche".
Thirdly, you could not even have read the application in 20 minutes (quite obviously), and I can't
imagine the USPTO would issue some rules which basically would have the consequence that examiners
would have to judge documents they even could not have read as a whole. (It seems to me that this
would be neglective, if not illegal.)
Considering payment of examiners, at least European examiners are well paid. (In the case of the
USPTO, I just don't know.)
The "20 minutes per application" might refer to a specific step, but then applications are simply
too different to be treated in a given time frame. I think this was a rumour...
Well, like I said, "true or not" - and based on
(no. of examiners * hours worked) / no. of applications received
it's probably more like 10-20 hours on average, based on figures at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Patent_and_Trademark_Office. However, stupid stuff does
get through (see that same page for some real lulus.)
So maybe I was just lucky, but speaking of my own case: they must have spent about 1-2 orders more
time. And actually, there is always more than one examiner. (Two at the USPTO. Three in Europe.)
Stefan, I _do_ think you are lucky (or I was unlucky :'( .) We had a case were we had a US examiner
who at least appeared not to have fully understood the patent and who chose to stick on a point in
the patent that he said conflicted with a previous patent - this was even after the mandatory
interview. From his comments, the problem seemed to be that he didn't really understand surround
audio in the context of Ambisonics - which is not that unusual! As far as I and my colleagues here
could see (and our patent agents) it appeared that he had simply done a keyword search for
"spherical harmonics" and "audio". Even though a) if he was right, every audio related patent
mentioning spherical harmonics would be dubious (at the very least) and b) the people involved in
the other patent wrote stating they did not agree with him, he refused to change his stance. In the
end we just gave it up as a bad job and let even the European patent lapse. I accept what you say
about the number of examiners, but I have to say I only ever saw one name mentioned in the documents
related to the US application - can't honestly say I remember about the European application,
probably because that was non-problematic.
However, maybe we should leave this now and get back to more interesting stuff.
:-)
Dave
--
These are my own views and may or may not be shared by my employer
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