> You can cut through a lot of this with good legal counsel, but that is really just contributing to the gamesmanship of the whole process.
True and true. In some ways perhaps that’s the point. It is a game of sorts, it is business competition; businesses temporarily monopolizing business on inventions in return for disclosing them. And it makes sense that legal protections for businesses are better & easier for those businesses when they spend money on lawyers, if a little pessimistic. Unfortunately the system is somewhat motivated to try to cut out people who can’t afford lawyers.
You mentioned bad/dumb patent examiners. I’ve never worked with them and only worked with patent lawyers, and I have to say I’ve been constantly impressed with their ability to absorb, understand, and describe highly technical work in legalese (and yes the language is sometimes performative and can sound funny to engineers). Teams creating these inventions take months and years to make something patentable, and when I think about how the lawyer’s job is to understand these new inventions in a short amount of time, over and over, week after week, I feel like they have a hard job and I’m routinely surprised at how well and how quickly they understand it.
>> I’ve been constantly impressed with their ability to absorb, understand, and describe highly technical work in legalese (and yes the language is sometimes performative and can sound funny to engineers).
This is one of the saddest aspects: so much high-value effort and skill towards an end that, in the whole, I view as a massive drain and retardant on human development.
> This is one of the saddest aspects: so much high-value effort and skill towards an end that, in the whole, I view as a massive drain and retardant on human development.
I think this speaks to the scale of the economy. There is all this waste. Soooo much waste. And patents are just one small aspect of the constant waste. And yet all these businesses and people, in aggregate "the economy", consistantly make money and progress and invent more. It's impressive.
The world does this despite the patent system. Not because of it. If the patent system were to disappear today all that invention would still go on. It would just put a lot of lawyers out of work and make a bunch of rich companies CEOs nervous.
Look at software: It existed for decades and decades without patents and the technological progress in that field vastly surpasses that of any other contemporary science/technology. Then we tried applying patents to software and it did nothing but create a giant mess, destroy small businesses, and make a bunch of patent attorneys (and their friends) rich. There is literally no benefit to society from software patents. It is 100% negative.
- Documenting and classifying inventions is valuable
- people choose to become a patent clerk/lawyer because of the stability. It enables them to take care of family, pursue hobbies, etc (see Einstein).
- the alternative for some is being an engineer but for others it might be a librarian
Patents are close to completely useless as a form of documentation. It's not valuable.
You may be thinking about old patents where people wrote real engineering information with real details on them that excluded non-working alternatives. Patents are not like that anymore.
Then that sounds like a management problem, not a fundamental problem with the concept of patent lawyers and clerks which this poster claimed was a “brain drain”.
It's absolutely a patent review problem. It's probably not caused by individual clerks, as each one of them can't cause something like this alone, but it shows on their work.
Patents have an inherent tension between being as explicit as possible, and leaving enough generality so that it's not trivial to infringe. It's not supposed to be an exact recipe.
The latter points are valid, but for the first - software engineers are usually best advised not to spend time looking at the patent database. For a long time (is it still true?) there were triple damages for knowingly infringing a parent, and in any case the function of the patent database as a publication of ideas is extremely small in software. I have literally not heard of anyone locating something they need to implement by looking at it.
No, but property rights in inventions are supposedly justified by the idea that this publishing will enable implementations when the patent expires. In the software world that means engineers. I don't know what audience you have in mind?
True and true. In some ways perhaps that’s the point. It is a game of sorts, it is business competition; businesses temporarily monopolizing business on inventions in return for disclosing them. And it makes sense that legal protections for businesses are better & easier for those businesses when they spend money on lawyers, if a little pessimistic. Unfortunately the system is somewhat motivated to try to cut out people who can’t afford lawyers.
You mentioned bad/dumb patent examiners. I’ve never worked with them and only worked with patent lawyers, and I have to say I’ve been constantly impressed with their ability to absorb, understand, and describe highly technical work in legalese (and yes the language is sometimes performative and can sound funny to engineers). Teams creating these inventions take months and years to make something patentable, and when I think about how the lawyer’s job is to understand these new inventions in a short amount of time, over and over, week after week, I feel like they have a hard job and I’m routinely surprised at how well and how quickly they understand it.