The guest post by Professor Jorge Contreras on Patently-O (Industry Responds to White House Calls for Prior Art, Examiner Training) summarises the significant patent-related initiatives in place now, as well as how the private sector has responded to them. In particular, the call for the private sector to help provide additional training for the patent examiners at USPTO and to disclose and share prior art piqued my interest.
Although the patent examiners know about their sector of expertise well, given they are busy with examining patent applications on a daily basis and the rapid advancement of technology right now, they are certainly not up to date with the technology progress. It will be beneficial to the companies to keep the examiners up to date, else more bad patents may pass through and, in turn, be used against them. However, I feel that there might be limited impact from the training as there is just too much to cover. It will take weeks or even months to be able to fathom what the progress is in every area under the examiner's expertise. Nevertheless, I still agree that this will be a necessary step to take lest they become cavemen. Every bit of training does help.
This brings to the point that I feel the disclosure and sharing of prior art would be more effective for the PTO. With greater accessibility to hitherto unknown technological development, examiners will be able to ascertain if patent applications are indeed new. Anyone will definitely be able to see why this is the case. However, a drawback would be that other companies can then figure out how some processes are done and attempt to copy them, especially since no patents were filed for them. A way to go about this might be to privatise this database of prior art such that they are only available to patent granting offices, which can also prompt more companies to be willing to disclose their knowledge. This way, overlapping patents can be rejected by explaining there is prior art, and companies can make use of the concepts for themselves but without monetising them through litigation.
Sources:
http://patentlyo.com/patent/2014/02/industry-examiner-training.html
Although the patent examiners know about their sector of expertise well, given they are busy with examining patent applications on a daily basis and the rapid advancement of technology right now, they are certainly not up to date with the technology progress. It will be beneficial to the companies to keep the examiners up to date, else more bad patents may pass through and, in turn, be used against them. However, I feel that there might be limited impact from the training as there is just too much to cover. It will take weeks or even months to be able to fathom what the progress is in every area under the examiner's expertise. Nevertheless, I still agree that this will be a necessary step to take lest they become cavemen. Every bit of training does help.
This brings to the point that I feel the disclosure and sharing of prior art would be more effective for the PTO. With greater accessibility to hitherto unknown technological development, examiners will be able to ascertain if patent applications are indeed new. Anyone will definitely be able to see why this is the case. However, a drawback would be that other companies can then figure out how some processes are done and attempt to copy them, especially since no patents were filed for them. A way to go about this might be to privatise this database of prior art such that they are only available to patent granting offices, which can also prompt more companies to be willing to disclose their knowledge. This way, overlapping patents can be rejected by explaining there is prior art, and companies can make use of the concepts for themselves but without monetising them through litigation.
Sources:
http://patentlyo.com/patent/2014/02/industry-examiner-training.html
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