[tightbookkeeper]

- Documenting and classifying inventions is valuable - people choose to become a patent clerk/lawyer because of the stability. It enables them to take care of family, pursue hobbies, etc (see Einstein). - the alternative for some is being an engineer but for others it might be a librarian

[marcosdumay]

Patents are close to completely useless as a form of documentation. It's not valuable.

You may be thinking about old patents where people wrote real engineering information with real details on them that excluded non-working alternatives. Patents are not like that anymore.

[tightbookkeeper]

Then that sounds like a management problem, not a fundamental problem with the concept of patent lawyers and clerks which this poster claimed was a “brain drain”.

[marcosdumay]

It's absolutely a patent review problem. It's probably not caused by individual clerks, as each one of them can't cause something like this alone, but it shows on their work.

[freejazz]

Patents have an inherent tension between being as explicit as possible, and leaving enough generality so that it's not trivial to infringe. It's not supposed to be an exact recipe.

[ajb]

The latter points are valid, but for the first - software engineers are usually best advised not to spend time looking at the patent database. For a long time (is it still true?) there were triple damages for knowingly infringing a parent, and in any case the function of the patent database as a publication of ideas is extremely small in software. I have literally not heard of anyone locating something they need to implement by looking at it.

[tightbookkeeper]

Working engineers are not the only audience.

[ajb]

No, but property rights in inventions are supposedly justified by the idea that this publishing will enable implementations when the patent expires. In the software world that means engineers. I don't know what audience you have in mind?