Dan Hollis writes: > On Tue, 15 Jan 2002, Joe Pfeiffer wrote: > > IANAL, but as near as I can tell the USPTO has almost completely given > > up on their responsibility to actually evaluate patents before > > granting them. The philosophy seems to be that they'll let anything > > go through, and if somebody doesn't like it let the courts sort it out. > > IMHO the individual examiners should be held liable if the patent is found > invalid due to prior art.
A good idea in principle, but given the amounts of money involved you'd never be able to hire another examiner... Something else I should mention -- it's also my understanding that, as you'd expect, patent law varies a lot from country to country. So even if I'm right in my recollections of how things work, that's limited to US law, and a Lithuanian (picked because I don't think the list has anyone from there) could very well remember things completely opposite and also be correct. -- Joseph J. Pfeiffer, Jr., Ph.D. Phone -- (505) 646-1605 Department of Computer Science FAX -- (505) 646-1002 New Mexico State University http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~pfeiffer Southwestern NM Regional Science and Engr Fair: http://www.nmsu.edu/~scifair
