Computer code is not patentable. If you actually read a "software patent," you'll see that they claim something along the lines of "A computer-based method for doing X, comprising using a computer to calculate A, B, and C, running operation Y on values A, B and C, then doing Z." If you try to file an application for "a computer program for doing X, comprising..." it will be swiftly rejected as not patentable subject matter.

Examiners receive work credit for examining amended applications or applications in which the applicant has requested a continued examination after a final rejection has been issued. It is actually much more work to allow a patent than to reject it, since as soon as your find prior art that reads on an application, you're done and you can move on to the next one. If you don't find prior art, on the other hand, it means you'll have to spend a LOT of time carefully reviewing anything and everything that might be relevant, or run the risk of getting nailed by Quality Assurance later on.

An examiner's work is regularly reviewed by the "quality assurance" people, a sinister and mysterious group that pulls a sampling of recent work and scrutinizes it. Anything that an examiner allows is much more likely to be reviewed, and will generally be reviewed in much more detail, than something that they reject. The "safe" way for an examiner to slack off without too much risk of getting into trouble is to slap together bullshit obviousness rejections, since the quality assurance people focus so much on anything that gets allowed and not so much on things that get rejected. To balance out the incentives that the Quality Assurance people might give an examiner to just reject everything, applicants have various options for appealing rejections that they feel are improper.

He said that the PTO uses allowed applications as the metric for efficiency. That is most certainly bullshit, regardless of any of the points that you raised.

The law says that a patent can't be granted on an invention that would be obvious to one of ORDINARY skill in the art. Something might be obvious to a person of extraordinary intelligence, skill, and experience, but that doesn't mean it's not patentable.

As for something being obvious just because it was developed nearly-simultaneously, you ignore the fact that competing companies often invest vast amounts of money and manpower into researching the same problem, only to come to about the same solution. I wouldn't say that an invention was obvious just because two different entities independently invented it if both entities had to invest millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours into the research.

What a ridiculous assertion. If two companies each set out to solve a problem, and after each investing millions of dollars and tens of thousands of man-hours into the research eventually come up with very similar solutions, you think that means the solution was "obvious"?

That patent was filed in 1993. Do you know of a published reference teaching the patent's claims from BEFORE the patent was filed? Laser pointers weren't so cheap and plentiful back then...

Hello,

I work for the patent office. It's actually very hard to get a patent. As a general rule, application examiners with the PTO try hard to reject everything, and they usually succeed. But there are something like 700,000 patent applications filed each year, and much of them are for stupid obvious crap. Even if 99.99% of the crap is caught and rejected, that still means that every year dozens of stupid thing will slip through the cracks and get issued, and people on slashdot will point to that tiny number of mistakes as proof that the PTO isn't doing it's job.

And that's fair enough, because if ANY patents that shouldn't be issued get issued, it means we screwed up. But you're utterly wrong in your assertion that "It has become disgustingly easy to patent something that really should not be patentable." Sure, if you file tens of thousands of applications for stupid obvious crap, then you might have a few of them slip through; but that's hardly an "easy" way to get a patent. Using your logic, I could point at the tiny percentage of people who die in plane crashes and use them as "evidence" that planes are deathtraps and that airlines have become disgustingly lax in their maintenance - and it might even seem like a persuasive argument, if you don't know about all the people who fly every year and don't die. Given the hundreds of thousands of applications for stupid crap that get filed, it's more or less inevitable that at least a few of them will slip through. Obviously the goal should be for an error rate of zero, but that's probably not really attainable.

I work for the patent office.

The efficiency metrics that the PTO uses to evaluate Examiners boils down to 1) how many applications they process (regardless of whether they are allowed or rejected) and 2) what percentage of their allowances and/or rejections are mistakes, with a "mistake" being either improperly rejecting or improperly allowing a patent.

In short, your assertion that "the PTO decided that the proper metric for measuring the efficiency of appraisers was to look at how many patents they *grant*" is total bullshit.

For the billionth time: the patent title is not what the patent covers. You'll fine a ton of patents for new types of car engines titled "engine for an automobile" or something similar. It doesn't mean that all you need to reject them is prior art showing any sort of automobile engine - you have to find their specific invention, as disclosed in the claims.

The patent's priority date is April 22, 1996. Starcraft was about three years late. There might very well have been examples of prior art from 1996 or earlier that should have invalidated this, but off the top of my head I can't think of any. All of the "prior art" that people are listing throughout this discussion are much too new. Everyone is just looking at the 2002 patent issue date, but in fact the original 1996 application date is the important thing.

Your earlier machine would render the newer machine+seat invention obvious, and the machine+seat patent application would be rejected (assuming your teleportation machine worked the same).

Patents are only enforceable in the country in which they are filed. The language doesn't matter. You are complaining about a problem that does not exist.