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by countingteeth
3482 days ago
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> Careful. You're not a patent attorney (and neither am I). But my attorney told me the engineer to not read claims and certainly not to read them to understand them. Yes, a standard engineer's employment agreement prohibits engineers from performing patent searches. Isn't this all a good argument that patents are hindering their intended purpose, e.g., PUBLIC DISCLOSURE OF INVENTIONS to advance the state of the art? If claims are written virtually incomprehensibly and are so useless as to not even be allowed as references to actual practitioners, I would argue they are not serving their purpose of public disclosure to advance the state of the art. |
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Patent searches are one thing and yeah, big companies like Apple don't want their engineers reading patents at all since it puts them in line for treble damages should they lose an infringement suit. Startups on the other hand, are a different breed and they're not going to fail based on infringement. So you won't see those terms in a startup's employment agreement. Later, maybe.
Also, patent search != reading claims. First, a patent is broken into roughly two halves: specification and claims. Claims are written in a very stylized legal manner which is not meant to teach at all. The specification teaches and supports the claims. Everything that's in the claims must be supported in the specification AND the specification must effectively teach the invention.
So when I say that you shouldn't read claims, I'm saying that you the engineer who's trying to learn from the patent's teaching is wasting your time trying to figure things out from the claims. Figure that out from the specification.
But saying don't read the claims doesn't mean don't do a patent search.
> patents are hindering their intended purpose, e.g., PUBLIC DISCLOSURE OF INVENTIONS to advance the state of the art
This is mistaken. The purpose of patents is to reward the development of new inventions with a temporary monopoly. In exchange for that monopoly, the patent must teach. Public disclosure is not the purpose, it's the other half of the deal. In house lawyers who say never do a patent search are being well, unnecessarily careful.