http://www.patentbaristas.com/archives/2007/08/22/patent-office-takes-applicants-to-the-woodshed-for-sending-too-much-work/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=patent-office-takes-applicants-to-the-woodshed-for-sending-too-much-work Freshly Brewed Bio/Pharma Chat. Served Up Daily. Tue, 07 Feb 2012 11:57:58 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.1 http://www.patentbaristas.com/archives/2007/08/22/patent-office-takes-applicants-to-the-woodshed-for-sending-too-much-work/comment-page-1/#comment-21091 USPTO Rule Changes » Playing Catch Up… Tue, 28 Aug 2007 04:59:42 +0000 http://www.patentbaristas.com/archives/2007/08/22/patent-office-takes-applicants-to-the-woodshed-for-sending-too-much-work/#comment-21091 [...] Patent Office Takes Applicants to the Woodshed For Sending Too Much Work [...] [...] Patent Office Takes Applicants to the Woodshed For Sending Too Much Work [...]

]]> http://www.patentbaristas.com/archives/2007/08/22/patent-office-takes-applicants-to-the-woodshed-for-sending-too-much-work/comment-page-1/#comment-20800 Gary Creason Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:49:30 +0000 http://www.patentbaristas.com/archives/2007/08/22/patent-office-takes-applicants-to-the-woodshed-for-sending-too-much-work/#comment-20800 Your foaming rant here accurately reflects the self-righteous outrage of much of the patent prosecution bar (particularly in the biotech/pharma area). But the patent prosecution bar has been increasingly isolated from reality since the mid-1990s, when the practice of filing 1,000-page fill-in-the-blank "template" applications with thousands of sequences and hundreds of claims became commonplace. With few exceptions, the biotech/pharma patent bar has abandoned all attempts to (and apparently has forgotten how to) define a real invention, within the statutory requirements. Have you actually read some of the garbage that passes for a biotech/pharma patent application these days? What do you expect the PTO to do with this stuff? Anyone who says the biotech/pharma patent bar has not been systematically abusing the system for the past decade has his or her head in the sand. The abuse has been so widespread for so long that it now passes for normal. Many of today’s biotech/pharma patent practitioners have never known any other way of practicing. But let’s forget about the PTO for a moment. What about the public? Have you done a freedom-to-operate search in the biotech/pharma area lately? Even the most carefully tailored search yields dozens of hits that consist of published applications containing hundreds (or even thousands) of pages, thousands of sequences and hundreds of claims, all of which are non-starters. Even though these ridiculous template applications are almost never worth the paper they're printed on, professional prudence requires an FTO opinion writer to plod through mountains of this garbage to properly verify that it is indeed garbage. Publication of these absurd applications is a public nuisance. And in the aggregate, the plague of these bogus applications constitutes a huge burden on the public, even if not one of them ever leads to an issued patent. Some form of relief from this abuse of the system is needed by the public, as well as the PTO. As for the new continuation rules, has the patent prosecution bar ever heard of the basic legal principle known as res judicata? The public is entitled to know at some point that an application is dead. The ability to achieve a reasonable level of business certainty regarding any given application within a reasonable amount of time is essential to the health of the biotech/pharma industry. Too much of the patent prosecution bar operates with an ivory tower mentality that is blissfully unaware of such real world considerations. While there may be justifiable criticism of certain details, the new rules package represents a long-overdue wake-up call to the patent prosecution bar. The system is broken -- and to blame it all on the PTO is delusional. Your foaming rant here accurately reflects the self-righteous outrage of much of the patent prosecution bar (particularly in the biotech/pharma area). But the patent prosecution bar has been increasingly isolated from reality since the mid-1990s, when the practice of filing 1,000-page fill-in-the-blank “template” applications with thousands of sequences and hundreds of claims became commonplace. With few exceptions, the biotech/pharma patent bar has abandoned all attempts to (and apparently has forgotten how to) define a real invention, within the statutory requirements. Have you actually read some of the garbage that passes for a biotech/pharma patent application these days? What do you expect the PTO to do with this stuff? Anyone who says the biotech/pharma patent bar has not been systematically abusing the system for the past decade has his or her head in the sand. The abuse has been so widespread for so long that it now passes for normal. Many of today’s biotech/pharma patent practitioners have never known any other way of practicing. But let’s forget about the PTO for a moment. What about the public? Have you done a freedom-to-operate search in the biotech/pharma area lately? Even the most carefully tailored search yields dozens of hits that consist of published applications containing hundreds (or even thousands) of pages, thousands of sequences and hundreds of claims, all of which are non-starters. Even though these ridiculous template applications are almost never worth the paper they’re printed on, professional prudence requires an FTO opinion writer to plod through mountains of this garbage to properly verify that it is indeed garbage. Publication of these absurd applications is a public nuisance. And in the aggregate, the plague of these bogus applications constitutes a huge burden on the public, even if not one of them ever leads to an issued patent. Some form of relief from this abuse of the system is needed by the public, as well as the PTO. As for the new continuation rules, has the patent prosecution bar ever heard of the basic legal principle known as res judicata? The public is entitled to know at some point that an application is dead. The ability to achieve a reasonable level of business certainty regarding any given application within a reasonable amount of time is essential to the health of the biotech/pharma industry. Too much of the patent prosecution bar operates with an ivory tower mentality that is blissfully unaware of such real world considerations. While there may be justifiable criticism of certain details, the new rules package represents a long-overdue wake-up call to the patent prosecution bar. The system is broken — and to blame it all on the PTO is delusional.

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