A drama in five acts: bad laws, not bad examiners, create obvious patents.
by Charles Duan June 10 2014
I. The problem
The patent examiner sat down at her desk and pulled up the next item on her examination docket. Patent application 13/292,359. "Studio Arrangement."
"Right in my area," she thought. She scanned the patent application text and flipped through the drawings. It seemed straightforward—a camera, a platform for holding an object, a couple of lamps, a backdrop. She’d seen all of this before.
She typed in a few search terms, looking for the prior art that would show this invention to be old and well-known. She browsed through a few old patents. Something triggered a vague memory of an old application she had examined years ago. Bits and pieces surfaced in her mind—a name here, a classification number there. She knew that she could find it, and after half an hour she did.
"Bingo!" she thought, placing the drawings from the old application next to the Studio Arrangement figures. Everything was lining up nicely. She began comparing the parts of each document, building up the legal argument that this arrangement of lamps and backgrounds could not be patented.
But then something caught her eye. A small sentence at the bottom of a page. Twenty-five words.
And those twenty-five words told her immediately that she could not reject the application over the prior art she found. She probably could not reject the application over any prior art she found.
She would have to grant the patent.
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