Holiday patent reading

Posted by J. Matthew Buchanan

November 26, 2008

I know you don’t want to quit reading about substantive patent law while you’re away from the office for turkey day, so I figured I’d share some ‘interesting reads’ I’ve come across over the last couple weeks.

Enjoy!

1. Dennis Crouch on the Patent Office’s blocking of search engines via robots.txt files

Dennis has really found something interesting here. For those of you that don’t know, robots.txt files help webmasters control the ability of bots to access particular content areas on a particular web server. The use of such files is standard practice in the web development arena and their mere presence is not worrisome.

You can read all about these files on robotstxt.org (the about page is particularly informative).

But, the robots.txt file uncovered by Dennis shows that the Office has instructed all bots to refrain from accessing all content on the server hosting decisions of the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences. Bots, of course, can ignore the directives of robots.txt files, but all reputable search engines no doubt follow them strictly, which means that none of the BPAI decisions are being indexed.

This begs the question: Is the Office, through this search engine blocking practice, failing to meet it statutory duty of “disseminating to the public information with respect to patents and trademarks?” (35 U.S.C. §2(a)(2))

2. Peter Zura on Barack Obama’s Transition Team member Reed Hundt - No fan of the U.S. patent system

All patent stakeholders are wondering what changes the forthcoming Obama administration will bring to the patent system. Peter connected a few interesting dots on the issue. Turns out, Reed Hundt, a Lead on President-elect Obama’s “Economics and International Trade Agency Review Team,” thinks “America’s patent system is a mess.” Oh, and he has more than a few radical ideas on how to fix it. How radical? Read Peter’s article.

3. Gene Quinn on Unequal Treatment at the United States Patent and Trademark Office

Gene observes that, even in the wake of KSR v. Teleflex, a two-tiered system in the Office is granting patents on inventions that are “clearly obvious” while denying patent protection to more worthy inventions:

“The Patent Office is not only treating similarly situated individuals differently in violation of the law, but they are also spending needless time addressing stupid inventions while meaningful inventions languish. This is not only terrible, it is recklessly stupid given our current economic crisis.”

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