On Sat, Mar 07, 2020 at 10:03:59PM -0500, Henry Spencer wrote:
On Sat, 7 Mar 2020, Stephen Daniel wrote:
Patents are supposed to be a non obvious extension of the prior art. I'm
not sure how patent examiners decide to award patents, but non-obvious is
never a requirement, and extension often isn't.
The US Patent Office (and its counterparts elsewhere) seems to have given
up on (a) paying enough to get and retain staff who are actually familiar
with the details of the fields they're covering, in (b) sufficient numbers
that they can actually spend serious time studying each patent. The
volume of applications is far greater than it was fifty or a hundred years
ago, and the resources allocated haven't grown to match.