Examiners get a salary of $43,000 PER YEAR which is not much in Maryland.
The majority of examiners have English as a second language and most have
Asian or
Vietnamese heritage. ( A look at the telephone directory of the department
is quite an eye opener).
They are also on a time schedule on how many patents that they must move
along
per hour. Since the Patent Office is a "cash cow" patents or "'prior art"
have been put on computor record
so that examiners can feed in a few salient words from the application and
then forward
the resulting computor patent matches to the new applicant so that he can
defend against the
grammar of"prior art"
..This now means that the new applicant cannot "plagerise" a pre awarded
patent grammatically.
Since the patent office does not spend time researching physics or reviewing
workability it does
not matter if the patent works or not.
Since the Government TAKES cash from the patent office where normally it
gives money to various
government offices it is encumbent on the patent office to move along
patent requests as fast as possible
and with as little work as possible to maintain the establishment and senior
examiners salaries,
of the latter there is very few., so that the department stays in business
So to sum up, the patent office now review patent requests for grammatical
duplication of "prior art"
plus ensuring that the format of any new application meets regulations and
to ensure that said application
is placed in the correct pre-assigned grouping depending on its physics or
intended use.
Now some may argue against the above but this is how I see patents are dealt
with at the present time.
Art



"Walter Maxwell" wrote in message
...
Sorry to hear that, Roy. I was very much involved with the RCA Patent
Dept in
my early years with RCA, 1949 to 1957. During that time the US Patent
Office
examiners were smart and tough. A patent used to be worth something.

Walt

On Thu, 14 Oct 2004 10:54:49 -0700, Roy Lewallen wrote:

Hate to break the news, Walt, but it happens very, very often. Even
years ago, when I was doing some consulting work on a patent case and
read a couple of hundred antenna patents, there was a great deal of
pseudo- and voodoo-science in issued patents. These days, it's rampant.

My favorite example is US patent #6,025,810, "Hyper-Light-Speed
Antenna", but I'm sure even this is far from the most egregious.

Roy Lewallen, W7EL

Walter Maxwell wrote:

I f there really is an issued patent on the EH antenna, the paragraph
above is
proof that the Patent Office examiner who approved the patent
application for
issuance was completely snowed by the applicant's patent attorney who
wrote the
application.

This doesn't happen too often, but it does happen. Unless the patent
examiner is
extremely well versed in electromagnetic theory he could easily be
persuaded
that the EH principle is valid, while it is not.

Walt Maxwell, W2DU