Originally published at: Government to pharma companies: stop registering sham patents to delay generics | Boing Boing
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Oh yay, the feds are finally thinking about going after some major corporations.
I can’t wait for the big changes to arrive!
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Me, a former patent examiner, to government: stop granting sham patents to delay generics
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Unfortunately, the incentives are all wrong IMHO. If the government denies a patent and gets sued, it has to (expensively) defend its actions in court. OTOH, if it grants a “non-novel” patent and somebody wants to produce the item, they get sued and the government is not a party to the lawsuit.
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Yup. And there’s also a lot of money to be made in application fees, which encourages permissive interpretations of applications, since the USPTO is self-funded. Not to mention the necessity for examiners to game the system to maximize their counts to make their quotas. The upshot is that whether or not an application is granted a patent has very little to do with its legitimacy.
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