Biggest Loser, Reject among Rejects
Okay, so I shouldn't let this bother me. I actually went looking for this. But now I want to add it to my "I suck" file which also contains my acceptance letter from Clarkson (accepted to program but not smart enough for any aid so if you can find $20000 in the next month you will be a grad student here), my rejection letter from Minnesota (no ifs ands or buts; I was totally lacked competence to become a Gopher), my rejection correspondence from not getting a job at Magnetic Instrumentation (I mean, come on, if you knew some of the people that worked there....so what if I know nothing about Power Electronics--does anyone else there?), and now this.
In my previous life I came up with some clever ways to get around some customers' applications problems, like we break magnets when we try to assemble them this way, and so on and so on. I was really just doing my job. However, in the industrial world there is a great concern about intellectual property, so we had to pursue patents on many of our ideas, when all we really wanted to do was sell the darn solutions and make money. So we spent, I spent, hours working with our IP folks out of the UK to see what they wanted to pursue in a patent (which meant delaying commercialization), then with our lawyers in Atlanta over the phone and with faxes editing and re-editing documents to meet filings. UGH. I could have been playing Tetris. I know, if the outcome had been different, like I actually had patents in my name, I would be buying the cool engraved plaques and displaying them in my bathroom.
So I went to look up the status of some patents, just for fun, maybe even to link here as a sort of bragging. I was already blogging it out in my head.
AND THEN I SAW IT.
THE STATUS.
FINAL REJECTION MAILED (!?!)
Of course, not being employed anymore means that I don't get copies of these sorts of things anymore, but they are a matter of public record so I could read everything.
In the examiner's description of why he rejects a patent, a commonly used term is "ordinary person skilled in the art." This would be like your peer, so in my case just about any motor engineer, or magnet engineer, or something like that. This is the threshhold that is used to say whether or not your idea is truly novel, or just a rip-off of an existing patent. Many of the reasons for my particular rejection were because many of my claims were similar to claims in another patent that we agreed was prior art but dissimilar, but the examiner didn't quite see it that way. There are lots of "ordinary person skilled in the art" would see that this other patent already claimed this, or, worse yet, the other patent's claims say the complete opposite of my patent. Whether or not they are true, the older claims, the approved claims of this other group, say that I'm either stupid or a liar. My favorite of these is when I claimed that certain magnets break when used a certain way which would be prevented by my invention, and the other patent says that magnets don't break period (they obviously haven't been to Black & Decker). This is the claim that the examiner felt the need to point out that even an ordinary person would see that my claim of magnets breaking had to be a bad claim. Yup, not just one skilled in the art, but anybody on the street.
If you want to read all the details, and some of you may have enough need for a daily dose of Schadenfreude, that you will enjoy the read. Go to the link in the title, look for the image file wrapper and you will see it there. UGH
Oh what was the invention? We called it the Mag-Comm, the integrated magnet commutator. It was basically a magnet bonded to a motor commutator. That's all.
Come on, who do you think I am, Dean Kamen?
In my previous life I came up with some clever ways to get around some customers' applications problems, like we break magnets when we try to assemble them this way, and so on and so on. I was really just doing my job. However, in the industrial world there is a great concern about intellectual property, so we had to pursue patents on many of our ideas, when all we really wanted to do was sell the darn solutions and make money. So we spent, I spent, hours working with our IP folks out of the UK to see what they wanted to pursue in a patent (which meant delaying commercialization), then with our lawyers in Atlanta over the phone and with faxes editing and re-editing documents to meet filings. UGH. I could have been playing Tetris. I know, if the outcome had been different, like I actually had patents in my name, I would be buying the cool engraved plaques and displaying them in my bathroom.
So I went to look up the status of some patents, just for fun, maybe even to link here as a sort of bragging. I was already blogging it out in my head.
AND THEN I SAW IT.
THE STATUS.
FINAL REJECTION MAILED (!?!)
Of course, not being employed anymore means that I don't get copies of these sorts of things anymore, but they are a matter of public record so I could read everything.
In the examiner's description of why he rejects a patent, a commonly used term is "ordinary person skilled in the art." This would be like your peer, so in my case just about any motor engineer, or magnet engineer, or something like that. This is the threshhold that is used to say whether or not your idea is truly novel, or just a rip-off of an existing patent. Many of the reasons for my particular rejection were because many of my claims were similar to claims in another patent that we agreed was prior art but dissimilar, but the examiner didn't quite see it that way. There are lots of "ordinary person skilled in the art" would see that this other patent already claimed this, or, worse yet, the other patent's claims say the complete opposite of my patent. Whether or not they are true, the older claims, the approved claims of this other group, say that I'm either stupid or a liar. My favorite of these is when I claimed that certain magnets break when used a certain way which would be prevented by my invention, and the other patent says that magnets don't break period (they obviously haven't been to Black & Decker). This is the claim that the examiner felt the need to point out that even an ordinary person would see that my claim of magnets breaking had to be a bad claim. Yup, not just one skilled in the art, but anybody on the street.
If you want to read all the details, and some of you may have enough need for a daily dose of Schadenfreude, that you will enjoy the read. Go to the link in the title, look for the image file wrapper and you will see it there. UGH
Oh what was the invention? We called it the Mag-Comm, the integrated magnet commutator. It was basically a magnet bonded to a motor commutator. That's all.
Come on, who do you think I am, Dean Kamen?
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