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The information on Groklaw is not intended to constitute legal advice. While Mark is a lawyer and he has asked other lawyers and law students to contribute articles, all of these articles are offered to help educate, not to provide specific legal advice. They are not your lawyers.

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Mobbing with VALID EVIDENCE | 211 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Yeah, but
Authored by: stegu on Thursday, July 19 2012 @ 02:01 PM EDT
It would probably be a bad idea to spam examiners
with irrelevant documents, and piling up large amounts
of relevant but superfluous submissions for one
single application would probably be improductive,
or even counterproductive as suggested above.

However, it could be very useful to use crowdsourcing
to find at least a few relevant pieces of prior art
for as many software patents as possible. As has been
demonstrated here on Groklaw, prior art can be found
with surprisingly little effort for many software patents
that have been issued, and I do not think that the
current crop of applications is of any higher quality.
(The reported increase in applications hints that
the quality is getting worse, not better.)

This could stop the worst abuses of the system, and
I'm hoping that is the purpose of this new rule.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

Mobbing with VALID EVIDENCE
Authored by: Wol on Thursday, July 19 2012 @ 03:02 PM EDT
That is the point you seem to be wilfully missing!

Yes, if he has hundreds of "prior art" documents dumped on him, it
could be counter-productive. But if every document he examines is on-point, then
he only need look at one or two of them.

More to the point, if he says "I received 200 documents, and examined three
of them. All three are valid prior art so I rejected the patent", it sends
a very clear signal to anyone inclined to fight the rejection, that they are not
going to get very far. The Patent Officer has another 197 documents waiting in
the wings ...

Cheers,
Wol

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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