Dave Malham wrote:
On 19/09/2011 00:44, Stefan Schreiber wrote:
Fair enough. The fact that the different patent systems are not
perfect doesn't justify to insult anyone involved.
Well, like I said, I do apologise - it was an unfortunate attempt at a
humorous dig at the system and the fact that patent examiners, who are
generally overworked and underpaid, often end up being forced to take
on patents which are not really in their sphere of expertise due to
pressure of work (one of the Uni's Patent Agent's told me that the US
patent office typically allocates less than 20 minutes per application
- true or not, it gives some indication of the scale of the problem)
This can't be true, because < my > (US) examiner wrote 20+ pages in the
first reaction I got, and they were very elaborated.
Secondly, she presented a quite big list of related documents.
Therefore, she had spent a considerable amount of time in the evaluation
of application, and for technical "recherche".
Thirdly, you could not even have read the application in 20 minutes
(quite obviously), and I can't imagine the USPTO would issue some rules
which basically would have the consequence that examiners would have to
judge documents they even could not have read as a whole. (It seems to
me that this would be neglective, if not illegal.)
Considering payment of examiners, at least European examiners are well
paid. (In the case of the USPTO, I just don't know.)
The "20 minutes per application" might refer to a specific step, but
then applications are simply too different to be treated in a given time
frame. I think this was a rumour...
So maybe I was just lucky, but speaking of my own case: they must have
spent about 1-2 orders more time. And actually, there is always more
than one examiner. (Two at the USPTO. Three in Europe.)
Best,
Stefan
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