On Thursday 15 July 2004 11:43, you wrote:
> On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 06:57, Bill Jonas wrote:
> > I'll just state up front that this is for homework.  I'm currently
> > taking a composition class and I've picked software patents as the topic
> > for the final essay (argumenative/persuasive format).
>
> I don't have any references, but I found this kind of interesting.
>
> I was talking to an IP lawyer this week and I asked him "What do you
> think is wrong with the USPTO?" (yeah, I like playing with fire)  And he
> gave an interesting response.  Apparently, the money that is payed to
> get a patent reviews becomes 'income' for the government, and so
> congress can allocated it as they wish.  So, even though all of these
> inventors are spending $x to get their patent reviewed by the USPTO, a
> small portion of x is actually spent on reviewers.  So, therefore the
> reviewers are overworked and can't spend the time required to do a good
> job.
>
> I thought that was interesting - and an argument that I hadn't heard
> before.
>
> 		--Ted

In my IEEE consultant's group, one of our members is a patent agent, who gave 
a talk on patents, copyrights, and trademarks.  One remark he made was that 
the last two or three patent office commissioners have been political 
appointees with no patent experience.  He also expressed the opinion that the 
actual patent examiners were overworked and had an extreme backlog.  Perhaps 
that explains traversties such as Amazon's "one click purchase" patent.

Vaughn

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