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Comment by jsmthrowaway | Hacker News Reader

Nice. Lawyers love ex parte and amicus curveballs.

Wasn’t there some kind of prior art project set up to coordinate a large part of work like this? I seem to recall a big splash about crowdsourcing citations of prior art a few years ago, and now I’m wondering how this process and that are related. Was someone filing to challenge patents once enough people claimed prior art through that system or something?

Seems strange to make it so expensive to call bullshit, particularly since it sounds like the examiner erred on something so basic as the presence of an inductor.

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Are you thinking of Ask Patents? https://stackoverflow.blog/2012/09/20/askpatents-com-a-stack...

That is indeed what I’m thinking of, but for some reason I thought it was something USPTO did. Looks like it’s just Q&A now, too, sadly.

At the time it was a joint effort between StackExchange, the USPTO and the Google Patent Search team.

I just spend a couple of minutes to see when the USPTO gave up but couldn’t find anything. Maybe someone here knows?

It is cheap/free to do it when it is first filed (pre-issuance submission), it's only more expensive after it is granted.

Does the cheap/free pre-issuance submission really matter when you have to spend thousands of dollars on a reexamination fee whether or not the patent gets invalidated or modified in the end?

I get that this is to help cover the USPTO's reexamination costs. But whatever the reason, it's still really expensive to call bullshit. And as the grandparent comment laments, this is a real shame given the low quality of many patents that are granted.

In this case a third party did the job the USPTO should have done when the patent was first filed by actually reading the patents citations and finding that the new patent wasn't a novel innovation on the cited patent.

Wouldn't it be nice if the USPTO paid the third party his $6000 back if they determine that he's right the patent should have never been granted in the first place?

Pre-issuance submission goes to the examiner before it is granted. You don't have to pay a reexamination fee I don't think? Any link to that?

Ah, that makes more sense. You had your chance, but we granted it.

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