This is why I think that the patent examination process should include a challenge-period, where anybody can suggest solutions to the problem posed in the patent-application.
1) Aggressively innovate and publish, including using the same front running techniques as used by industry and academia.
2) Aggressively challenge all patents in a classification. Rapid prototyping and manufacturing, robotics, farming and transportation are all huge land grabs that are going on right now.
3) Get the Bayh–Dole Act repealed or neutered. A penny of public funds (including the facilities, any of the staff, etc) and it should be a public good, available to all.
4) Make the patent office no longer a profit center
Yet many bogus patents still slip through. Challenging patents is a costly and time intensive process.
That's quite a bit for an opensource developer to have on hand, but peanuts for major corporations.
Individuals (like the original project in this case) and the public at large (court/challenge costs) shouldn’t be burdened with the costs of fixing the PTO’s fuckups.
You're basically closing down the patent system here, any prior disclosure anywhere in the World, in any language can be used to show the invention lacks novelty.
There are some restrictions in different jurisdictions on what can be used to show there is no invention (ie there is no 'inventive step' or it's 'obvious' [it's a legal definition, not just a dictionary definition of this term that is used]).
If you're going to hold an examiner liable (there's actually a law in the UK protecting civil servants from liability, but hey) then you're going to have to give them lots of time and lots of resources ... that's going to make it all too costly.
You'll spend more than is profited from most patents in order to be sure that a patent won't be challenged in court ... and it still could be, just under other facets of the law, such as whether the disclosure is sufficient to work the invention.
You have to allow people to be less than perfect. If you're a programmer, imagine you had essentially unlimited liability if you created a single bug (examiners don't know if the patent is worth nothing, or 100s-of-$Millions, that's all down to externalities).
Could the system be improved, for sure, but it's always going to have to balanced against cost of administration. If you're court system is working effectively you don't need anything like a perfect parent examining system. If you're courts aren't working ... well fix them instead of spending disproportionately elsewhere.
>then you're going to have to give them lots of time and lots of resources ... that's going to make it all too costly.
If the system has to become prohibitively costly to get it to a level of semblance of actually working, then one has to wonder if it's worth it at all for it to exist.
https://www.uspto.gov/patents/initiatives/third-party-preiss...
Note that I'm not aware of any way to challenge an application on non-prior-art grounds like 101, 112, etc. But I imagine emailing the examiner assigned to the application would work. Unfortunately examiners aren't assigned until a few weeks to a few months before examination, so a challenger will need to periodically check the status of the application before contacting the examiner.
You can look up the examiner's phone number here: https://portal.uspto.gov/EmployeeSearch/
Email addresses are typically firstname.lastname@uspto.gov.
What I propose is that anyone can submit solutions to the original problem stated in the patent, without yet knowing the solution proposed in the patent. This allows us to demonstrate that the solution is trivial to those who are skilled in the art.
In practice, almost no third parties submit prior art, which is a lot simpler than submitting solutions. So I doubt people will submit any significant amount of solutions.
With massive amounts of money, since the PTO has made it impossible for the system to actually be fair.