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Comment by admax88q | Hacker News Reader

How brain dead or just checked out are patent office clerks that patents like this are granted.

My friend was a patent clerk. She is pretty sharp. She explained that rules make it much more time-consuming to deny an application than to grant it or coach the applicant on changes they need to make in order to win a grant. Something about needing to explicitly refute each claim. Further, clerks are given quotas on how many patents they must review a week. It’s a pretty crushing load, so the system favors grants.

This just pushes the validation of a patent into the courts, and at a much higher cost than properly researching its validity from the beginning.

> Something about needing to explicitly refute each claim

Seems like a wholly reasonable rule, no? We don't want the government to arbitrary grant or deny something without applying the same rules to everyone?

Sure, but to grant a patent, you just have to say “approved.”

I'd imagine there's an art to making the application wordy and confusing enough to slip through.

If a patent clerk is confused by the patent, then it should be rejected not granted.

The whole premise of the patent process it that you disclose your invention for the good of the population and in return you are granted a temporary monopoly over your invention.

I would never, ever, reference a software patent in order to implement a patented invention. They do not serve as any usable guide for the so called "invention." Therefore they are a perversion of the patent process and should not be granted.

> If a patent clerk is confused by the patent, then it should be rejected not granted.

I think GP means so confused they don't know they're confused.

The language used for describing patents is not quite English, in some ways it's a bit like a programming language, you can sort of create variables, arrays (the first X, the second X, ...), subroutine calls (even recursive calls provided they don't recurse infinitely, though that pushes the cost up) some words have different meanings ("or" for example is always exclusive or) etc etc

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