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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 | # ]
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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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