Another New Experience For Me

[davidschroth]

So, I'm working with one of the company's lawyers on a patent application.

In the past, I've always stumbled over not obvious to a skilled person bit. After all, if I could think of it, it must be bloody obvious.

Which is unfortunate - I did some stuff in the late 80s/early 90s that we probably should have attempted to patent. I don't know if anyone else has ever done anything like, but after seeing what the state of the art is in Linux - well, I'd have to think my odds are pretty good.

This one, however, mostly seems like a throwaway.

We had some stuff that some pretty sharp people designed and implemented. And patented, too.

And I just came along, and decided we could do things better. It seemed obvious to me, but if those other sharp guys didn't think of it, maybe it's not so obvious.

Anyway, the experience is different for me. I sat down with the lawyer (who was a hardware engineer, before she went into the legal field), and tried to describe what I did. Which involved a fair amount of background description.

And she went off, and wrote something up, and sent it to me.

And it's amazing how little an ex-hardware engineer can understand about software. Which mostly says that I really didn't do a very good job of explaining things. So I wrote up a rather more detailed explanation of how things currently worked, and sent it back to her.

I imagine there will be many more iterations before we're done.

My name is actually on two other patent applications, but my involvement with drafting the applications was minimal.

The first patent was my idea, but the hardware engineers who actually implemented the idea did all the writing on the patent.

The other one is mostly my work, but I found I couldn't write up an application for something I didn't really believe was patentable. So someone else wrote it up, but my name is/will be on it as well.

Comments

[mia-mcdavid.livejournal.com]

I used to work for a patent lawyer at U.S. Gypsum. It seemed to me we were mostly working on cheapie construction materials that any moron could put together. I'm sure some of the stuff I worked on is out in the workplace today making new homes shoddier for all of us . . .

[thirdworld.livejournal.com]

Never underestimate a smart person's ability to be a Jack of all trades -- especially not your own. There are too many times in my career that I've had such experiences.