Dave Malham wrote:
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.)
Which is 1 to 2 orders more, just as I wrote. (about factor 50...)
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!
Firstly, the examiner didn't understand some things. However, I was able
to explain these. Here I probably was lucky. (At the EPO, I had a very
twisted case of "they don't understand something however well you
explain", however I think this doesn't belong onto the list. )
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.
I am sorry to hear all this. I had some nearly as bad experience last
year...
However, maybe we should leave this now and get back to more
interesting stuff. :-)
Yes! ;-)
Best,
Stefan
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