Primary Examiner: Blackman; Rochelle-Ann J. Other patents by the same examiner: http://patents.justia.com/examiner/rochelle-ann-j-blackman
It is the examiner's job to reject patents which aren't innovative, and that clearly hasn't happened here.
It is the examiner's job to reject patents which aren't innovative, and that clearly hasn't happened here.
What about other examiners?
This feels a little too close to being a witchhunt. Once we start talking about "why isn't the internet reporting these people to their employers?" the conversation has stopped being about ideas.
EDIT: The concerns seem justified. I'm just saying that maybe we shouldn't be trying to use HN to organize the end of individual careers.
Calling attention to the fact that this patent was examined by particular individuals seems ok. It's just a fact.
Using HN as an organizational vehicle to help angry people on the internet get some specific people fired, by name, would be a troubling new trend for HN. We're a community, not a task force.
Even though I can't invent a new clean energy source, I try to reduce energy use where I can.
How do you feel about filing complaints against cops for, say, beating up arrestees? What about taking bribes?
If reporting a cop for taking bribes is OK, why is reporting a patent examiner for awarding a patent in the face of prior art bad?
What about reporting a clerk to their manager for speaking to you rudely? Not only does this happen all the time, I don't see a lot of people saying hey, lay off the rude clerks.
edit: a pair of summary examples:
"X is a satanist". This doesn't impact X's performance as a patent officer, or really anything else.
"X couldn't recognize prior art if it was disclosed in the patent application". This directly impacts performance as a patent officer, and can properly be reported to X's employer.
Oh, there's no question: I love being beaten by police officers! And bribery is good for the soul, don't you think?
Seriously though, using HN as a way of organizing large numbers of people to action against specific employees is probably stepping a bit too far. That's almost the very definition of an internet witchhunt. Getting these people fired won't fix the underlying problems.
Sure, I picked a favorable example. I go on to directly ask you about the analogy: If reporting a cop for taking bribes is OK, why is reporting a patent examiner for awarding a patent in the face of prior art bad? Do you have a response?
> Getting these people fired won't fix the underlying problems
I'd say that depends on how many people get fired. If the effort to throw them out persists, the patent office will change.
Getting one person fired, calling it a victory, and going home is unlikely to fix any underlying problems.
Makes you wonder when someone will throw up a crowd-sourcing website that tracks patent examiners where people can submit/link to questionable patents they awarded and upvote/down vote to get some kind of consensus. I also wonder if people would really care enough to take part in something like that.
http://patents.stackexchange.com/
I guess they aren't interested in focusing on individuals though.
It's funny how branding works, I searched for "patent overflow" to find the site.
I agree that it's very interesting, and its probably very telling as to the group of people that is probably going to be best equipped to addressing the problem without having to hack away at traditional means that have thus proven themselves highly ineffective/slow moving at this point.
I think that means there is probably going to be a subset of that audience that would participate in something like that but with more focus on individuals and pressuring the patent office to act through some means (email,tax,phone calls, transparency on a systemic issue with some data). I guess this could be a spin on civic engagement.
So, if not here on HN, then where?
If you are referring to a vindictive mob singling out a low-ranking individual for mob justice, nowhere. That's about as far from the hacker ethos and the principles of a functional society as one can get.
It sounds really terrible when you say it like that.
That's certainly worth a few frivolous patents, don't you think?
Apart from the two defining factors of a witch hunt: (1) irrational (2) assumption of guilt.
I'll grant you the "Internet" part, though.
> Getting these people fired won't fix the underlying problems.
Arguing against taking action is almost guaranteed to let these problems fester and get worse for almost everybody except those very few who are profiting from the situation right now (the ones that you are trying to protect from an imaginary witch hunt, a currently non-existent situation).
Then there's of course evoking the medieval imagery of torture, stake burning and death. Which is maybe appropriate as long as you're actually talking about e.g. the old 4chan (and similar) style "Internet witch hunts", mob justice, personal harassment and bullying.
But it is nothing short of disingenuous when referring to people taking action and filing complaints when they notice someone doing a bad job in a high position of power. Even if those complaints may result in more than just a slap on the wrist (which seems like a likely outcome, anyway).
The fact that people notice this as a group or a community doesn't make it a "witch hunt". And arguing to not do anything just because a lot of people are aware of it, is really quite silly, counter intuitive or counter productive (however you want to call it).
I'd be right with you if there was any suggestion remotely like a 21st century equivalent of stake-burning or mob justice, but there isn't.
So please, this is not a witch hunt. It's merely us saying that normal people, like you and me, are behind some of the madness that could potentially affect a giant section of the population. Treat them like human beings, and maybe they'll take the initiative next time without our prompting.
This is at least arguably discussing how to report a legitimate concern.
Specifically I would say that a witch hunt is characterized by an assumption of guilt, combined with a high false-positive rate, combined with offers for leniency if the accused points their finger at others. That's how the House Un-American Activities Commission did it, and those are the parallels between the HUAC and Salem that Arthur Miller identified.
Merely accusing somebody of doing their job poorly isn't anything like a witch hunt.
What are the odds that her supervisor has no idea what's going on? They either have a broken quality review process or, more likely, have been told to do more with less for so long that people know they aren't doing good work but need to deliver numbers. Hiring people to work in the federal government is a bitter political issue so it's almost certain that they're understaffed, particularly since the legally-mandated process and payscale will complicate hiring technical experts in fields which pay well.
In either case, you can complain about this person in particular but you really should be contacting your congressional representatives to request both legal reform and increased budget / accountability for the USPTO to avoid some congressman's “savings” costing industry billions when a bad patent is issued.
Just reading the list gives you no useful information whatsoever about how well or how poorly she is doing her job. All the list has is the abstracts from the patents. A patent abstract is kind of like the blurb on the back of a book, or a trailer for a movie. They give you an overview of what the patent covers, but there will be innumerable ways to accomplish what the abstract describes without infringing the patent.
When you are looking at a list of patents to figure out if you might be infringing one of them, or to figure out if one of them describes a solution to a problem you are trying to find a solution for, the abstract is more of a tool for telling you which patents you can skip rather than what ones you need to take a deeper look at.
To see what the patent actually covers, you have to read the claims. However, the claims are interpreted in light of the specification, so you have to read that, too. A claim may appear to be quite broad, but the discussion in the specification might limit general terms in the claim to very specific values or meanings. In most cases, a patent is not something you can just sit down and quickly understand, even if you are an expert in the field the patent is in.
Even this is not always enough. You should also read the "file wrapper" for the patent. That's the collection of documentation generated during the processing of the patent application. It will include things like the examiner's prior art search results, initial rejections of claims, the letters from the application trying to persuade the examiner to change their mind about rejected claims, answers to questions from the examiner, and stuff like that. You can get the file wrapper online through the "Patent Application Information Retrieval" (PAIR) interface [1].
The title of the article is politically biased. Amazon did not patent shooting a subject in front of a white background. They also never patented buying something with just one click.
The problem is, that the political agenda against patents (and the people who oppose them, it seems) don't care whether the patents are on something innovative or not.
For instance, I participated in some work that resulted in a patent of a solution for some very difficult problems in MMOs. The outraged headline was "Company patents playing games online!"
When all of the opposition against patents comes form people misrepresenting patents, it's hard to see it as anything other than sour grapes that certain companies are more innovative than others. (the recent anti-patent movement is coincident with a specific innovation.)
Here's the abstract, for those who tl;dr'ed the article:
"Disclosed are various embodiments of a studio arrangement and a method of capturing images and/or video. One embodiment of the disclosure includes a front light source aimed at a background, an image capture position located between the background and the front light source, an elevated platform positioned between the image capture position and the background, and at least one rear light source positioned between the elevated platform and the background. A subject can be photographed and/or filmed on the elevated platform to achieve a desired effect of a substantially seamless background where a rear edge of the elevated platform is imperceptible to an image capture device positioned at the image capture position."
It appears that they've managed to patent the idea of setting up two lights, a white background, and a small pedestal for the object to be photographed. Isn't it a logical certainty that this has been done before? How is this an innovation worthy of legal protection?
Here's the abstract..."
Yes the abstract makes it sound very vanilla. OTOH that's the whole point of an abstract, to give the most cursory and non-detailed summary of the thing possible. Here's a slightly more detailed summary of what's being patented:
"More specifically, embodiments of the disclosure can allow images and/or video of an item placed in a studio arrangement as described herein to be captured with a background that appears, when captured with an image capture device, as a near perfect white without the need for post-processing, retouching, or other image manipulation. In other words, images and video of items captured in the studio arrangement appear against a background that is equivalent to a white background when converted into a web color hexadecimal triplet corresponding to a true white."
As far as inventions go that isn't the wheel or light bulb but it's still a legitimate invention. This patent is fine under the rules of the game today. I would be happy if 95% of current patents, including this one, weren't issued but the impetus for that change needs to come from legislation.
Really? That's both trivially obvious as a goal and something which has been independently re-"invented" countless times since the dawn of printed product catalogs. The only difference is that they tossed in some technical jargon about the web — I strongly doubt that it'd have been issued if it referred to the identical process in the print world.
The desire for something like this might be obvious but the actual multiple moving parts they've arraying to achieve it in fact constitutes an invention. There might be many ways of achieving the same result -- those different setups are also inventions. Go take a look at how many patents there were for light bulbs before Swann and Edison.
Having clients receive letters from shakedown operations (e.g. a patent for part of a wired in-store POS system being claimed as integral to every online storefront) I'm rather skeptical about your belief that there's a significant problem of dishonesty on the patent reform side. Yes, there might be the occasional headline which oversells things but for every example you provide you can find a dozen cases where someone's lawyer made an equally outrageous claim which cost people doing actual innovative work millions of dollars.
1. Read the claims. Of the thousands of comment this has generated, only a miniscule fraction have even mentioned the claims. The scope of the patent is defined by the claims, so that is what you must invalidate. The broadest claim is conveniently quoted for you here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7725200
2. If you want to prove non-novelty, find one documented reference that covers or even suggests using the exact combination of elements in the claim. Of course, the documents must be published and clearly dated before the priority date of this patent.
3. If you cannot do that, you may try to prove obviousness, in which case you need to find a combination of the documents above. How many documents you need to combine is not specified, but a rule of thumb is, anything fewer than 3 - 5 references. Anything more makes it difficult to prove obviousness.
4. If you cannot do that, try to prove it invalid as non-statutory patent eligible matter. That is tough, because broadly speaking, anything that has the least bit of industrial utility counts.
5. Another option is to show that the language of the claim is ambiguous. That does not mean “obfuscation” or “patentese”; this language is like plain English to those who read it every day. What it means is, for instance, if the language of the claim refers to one of many elements, but it is not clear which element it refers to. In NLP terms, it is a case where co-reference resolution is not definite. These types of invalidation are rare because they are easy to catch and typically examiners catch them pretty quickly.
6. One last option is to show that the specification does not have enough detail to support whatever is claimed. If the claim requires 10/3 lighting ratio and the spec does not mention it anywhere, that's an easy invalidation. Pointing to online comments from a thousand people and so-called “tech journalists” who do not know what claims are, and who can claim without any documented basis that “it's been used for ages”, does not count as a reference.
If you have any relevant prior art, you can post it to askpatents.com, and someone has already conveniently started a thread for it here: http://patents.stackexchange.com/questions/6543/photography-...
It'll probably not get any attention because 1) it's already issued, so no examiner is looking for prior art for it, and 2) nobody will infringe or otherwise care enough to go through the hassle and cost of a re-examination. However in case somebody does decided to do so, askpatents will be a good place they might look at.
So go ahead, put your money where your mouth is, and go find prior art. That will be more constructive (and enlightening) than making uninformed comments on forums read by nobody that makes policy decisions.