> (P.S. Why isn't there a simple PTO URL for "show patent number XXXXXXX"???)
It's going to get even worse at the end of the month when they retire the website you linked to. Patent documents can't be linked to directly in the replacement as far as I'm aware.
I'm not aware of any other examiners who use this tool. I did ask an examiner I know to try it and they did, but they didn't find it useful. They suggested that the warnings that plint returns are more relevant to the areas I examine than what they examine, which is fair. They also found my syntax for antecedent basis checking to be confusing.
The personal reason why I made it nitpicky is that there's a huge variability between examiners in terms of which rejections to make. I'm a junior examiner, so everything I do has to be approved by someone else. They might tell me to remove a certain rejection because they don't have a problem with that, and to add some other rejections for things they care about. In my view, it would be better to get a wide range of possible rejections upfront and then think about which ones the person signing off on the office action cares about. The alternative is going back and forth about which rejections to do, which would take more time.
The JSON configuration file I use filters out a bunch of the rules because the person who signs my office actions right now doesn't care about those ones, or I don't care about those ones. I need to update the README file to say that.
Also, an attorney writing a patent application has much less information about which rejections are likely than I do. So from the perspective of an attorney, I think being nitpicky makes sense too. Not that I'm aware of any attorneys who use plint.
plint might not even be nitpicky enough. Recently r/patentexaminer had a poll [0] where about 6% of examiners said that the term "at least one" was indefinite... which is astounding to me as I think that's totally fine from a definiteness standpoint. As I recall, I have some warnings in my linter for enablement on that in case it's not clear how having two or more of something would work if only one is disclosed. But usually "at least one" is fine from an enablement perspective.
Looks like the USPTO is hiring in multiple areas right now.
It might take a couple attempts to get hired. I was rejected the first time I applied.
The USPTO doesn't care much about an applicant's background aside from whether the applicant has a technical degree. New examiners with expertise in particular areas probably won't be assigned to their areas of expertise, even if there's a strong demand for examiners in those areas. Yes, this makes no sense, but it's how the USPTO operates at the moment. I had zero experience with the areas I was assigned before I became an examiner.
(Again, this is all just my opinion, not that of the USPTO, US govt., etc.)
Yes, my personal opinion is that enablement is not a true requirement in the US. I think a lot of problems with the current patent system would be helped by making the law stricter about enablement and also giving the USPTO more resources (money, in particular) so that examiners can enforce the enablement requirement.
Also, to be clear: Patents legally aren't for laypeople. They're for people working in the field of the invention.
Your proposed claim format would greatly improve clarity.
I particularly like the definitions and examples being included in the claims. Too often patent attorneys define terms contrary to their ordinary meaning. I might not think to check the specification for a definition, and end up wasting a lot of time.
With that being said, I sometimes do 112(b) rejections for exemplary language in claims as they can make the claims unclear (for example: "for example"). I think if the claim or specification was written to make it clear that the examples are just examples and not limiting the claim then it would be okay.
Reference numbers are common in patent claims outside of the US, but it seems that US patent attorneys worry that adding reference numbers would limit the breadth of the claims. There's no statute or USPTO rule against reference numbers in the claims and I'm not aware of any case law justifying not adding them. Not having reference numbers in the claims is a loss for clarity, particularly when the claims use different terminology than the specification (which is unfortunately common).
(Again, this is just my opinion, not that of the USPTO, US govt., etc.)
My experience working as a patent examiner agrees fully with the title: legal texts tend to be hard mostly because they're poorly written. (DOC lawyers make me add this: This post is just my personal opinion, not that of the USPTO, DOC, US govt., etc.)
I've been trained in patent legal terminology, which isn't that bad. Patent documents are still frequently difficult to understand. I have one application on my docket where I'm going to have to rewrite one of the claims to understand what it's saying, and no, that shouldn't be necessary... And the situation with patent documents is worse than the situation described in the abstract as many attorneys write vaguely.
The argument that "lawyers are the intended audience" isn't legally sound either, as under 35 USC 112(a), patents are supposed to "enable a person skilled in the art [...] to make and use the [invention]". If an attorney argues that patents aren't supposed to be understood by non-attorneys, they're wrong, full stop.
Unfortunately, I'm not really allowed to do 112(a) enablement rejections. I'd do those sorts of rejections frequently if I could, but I think I can count the number of times I've done 112(a) enablement rejections on one hand. The law in other countries seems more strict than in the US. I'm told that Japan in particular takes enablement a lot more seriously than the US does.
I'm a patent examiner and I can't agree with "It's very precise if you can learn to read it". A large fraction of patent applications I've worked on are unclear. I even wrote a linter to help catch some problems.
(DOC lawyers make me add this: This post is just my personal opinion, not that of the USPTO, DOC, US govt., etc.)
Edit: I will agree that patent claims can be precise, but so can normal English. I think patent claims are too often not precise.
> Could you elaborate on this? I'm still on the fence about even having independent dotfiles in a separate repo.
I'm not quite sure what specifically you want me to elaborate on, but I'll write about how similar my work and personal computers are.
My USPTO computer is almost entirely independent of my personal computer. I run Linux on my personal computer, and the USPTO computer is Windows. The repository for my tool, plint, is on both my USPTO and personal computers. With that being said, I make all the commits to the GitHub repository on my personal computer.
> If I may ask yet another question: if your tools make you more efficient, does that impact perception of other examiners' "KPI metrics?"
plint doesn't seem to have any effect on how I am perceived or how other examiners are perceived. I've told some examiners about plint. Some don't seem to be interested, others like the idea. I don't know of anyone else using plint on a regular basis.
Also, using a tool like this doesn't necessarily make an examiner more efficient in the KPIs that upper management cares about. The most "efficient" approach would be to ignore 112(b) problems unless they are particularly obvious. In fact, I think that's what the incentives encourage: doing the bare minimum and moving on to the next application. However, a tool like this makes quality examination more efficient. I'd like to do as high quality a job as I can given the absurd time restrictions on my work. USPTO upper management gives a lot of lip service to quality, but quality isn't rewarded like "production" is. (Again, all this is my opinion and I don't speak for anyone else.)
The USPTO uses a lot of automation, but frequently not where they should.
Note: I am a current USPTO patent examiner, and this is my opinion, not that of the USPTO or US govt.
The USPTO apparently has two contractors to classify patent documents. I've heard that some sort of AI system is used for classification, in combination with a lot of poorly paid contractors. In my experience, the classification is so frequently wrong that this is clearly not working. It might seem okay to upper management, who never has to actually deal with the classification being inaccurate. But examiners aren't happy with it.
Many people are calling for AI search. The new head of the USPTO mentioned it during a recent all-hands meeting. Unfortunately, the people who propose AI search don't seem to realize that 1. the USPTO has at least 5 AI search tools at their disposal (PLUS, More Like This, Dialog's similarity search, IP.com's similarity search, and Google Patents similar documents) and 2. none of these AI search tools work that well. In my experience, most of the time these tools don't return useful documents. (I still try them for every application as there's little downside.) The documents are usually close but it's rare that I'll actually use one of these documents in a prior art rejection. AI search sounds good to people who have never searched for patents and particularly have never used the existing AI search tools. AI search technology probably won't be good for a decade or more.
In contrast, tools to analyze patent claims for various problems (basically, linters) have been available for around 30 years and can be quite useful in my opinion. But the USPTO has no such tool available to examiners, and analysis under 112(b), etc., is almost always done manually. I wrote my own tool, which I run on my USPTO computer on a regular basis.
There are a huge number of opportunities to streamline USPTO operations with automation. Why are IDS forms not computer-readable? Why is so much information not auto-filled? Why do I have to fill out "bib data sheets" for every application? Why do I have to manually upload my search history when the system could easily automatically grab it for me? Etc.
And automation isn't enough. There should be more data validation in the process, as a lot of problems can be automatically caught at the time of filing or when I post an office action. That's when fixing these problems would be easiest.
Current USPTO patent examiner here. The job is regarded as difficult by the vast majority of examiners, as it's based on a quota system and examiners don't get enough time to do a quality job. I don't know of a single examiner who works only one day a week. Many work unpaid overtime to meet their quotas, euphemistically called "voluntary overtime", which is rarely voluntary. There's about 50% attrition in the first year for new hires right now. That sound easy to you? I don't know any other job that hires white-collar professionals with such high attrition.
You can find patent examiners who say that being a patent examiner is relatively easy. These folks typically changed from a notoriously difficult job in law or academia. So it's only relatively easier. Beyond these cases, there do seem to be some examiners who have an easy time, but that's quite rare in my experience, and I'd question the quality of their work.
As for why I took the job: I came from academia, so the job is easier in some respects. The quota isn't entirely bad: It's hard to meet, yes, but it's also mostly objective. If an examiner's numbers are good, the USPTO is happy with them. That contrasts with my experience in academia, where one's job performance is often subjective. If a researcher's boss decides they don't like the researcher for whatever reason (office politics, the researcher is socially awkward, etc.), there might be nothing the researcher could do to recover from that. The job also does give me a lot of freedom in other ways: I can live mostly anywhere I want to, I'm not expected to work all the time (production numbers beat looking busy by working all the time), there are few IP restrictions (aside from that I can't get a US patent), etc. The main problems for me are that the quota is too high and that I don't care for the technology I'm assigned (though the technology could be a lot worse).
(It should go without saying that this comment is my own opinion and not that of the USPTO, US govt., my previous employers, etc.)
I think patent attorneys and agents could avoid most of this problem if they wrote better. I'm a patent examiner (and this post only represents my own opinion, not that of the USPTO or US govt.), but it seems to me that patent applications are typically written quickly. Clearly defining terms is an afterthought, particularly given that many attorneys and agents see value in being vague.
Yes, maybe their explicit definition could cause them trouble later, but I think the lack of an explicit definition is more likely to cause trouble. I have examined applications with useful explicit definitions, or a reference to a preferred dictionary. I also examined one application where the applicant redefined a term contrary to its normal meaning in the middle of the specification, and that redefinition was critical to understanding the claims. I personally think all special definitions should go in an easy-to-find section.
Edit: I'll also use this opportunity to make a shameless plug for my patent claim analyzer, which will identify a lot of ambiguous language in patent claims.
It's going to get even worse at the end of the month when they retire the website you linked to. Patent documents can't be linked to directly in the replacement as far as I'm aware.
https://www.uspto.gov/about-us/news-updates/uspto-launches-n...