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Prior art and being obvious to experts in the field is being largely ignored when the bulk of patents are issued. With the knowledge explosion that is increasing geometrically from increased education, population, computer power, communications and collaboration combined with declining costs of discovery caused by lower computational costs, software, research foundries of all types, mems and many other factors, the patent issue will become more critical every day. It needs to be solved on an international level or the current mess will reach critical mass and cause a legal explosion benefitting only lawyers/law firms while draining valuable talent that has to be devoted to litigation and patent games. Also, as knowledge increases most patents cover a smaller and smaller slice of knowledge to the point many are the result of basic science and would/are discovered by multiple sources in tighter and tighter time frames making it all the more difficult to determine who actually discovered the knowledge first and who just won the race to the patent office. Perhaps patent applications should be open to challenge before they are granted? I hope this becomes an active debate with fresh perspectives of solving this increasing complex problem. I can think of few forums that would be better than SemiWiki for discussion of this issue.
Arthur: You mention "patent games" In the last few years I have seen many patents with several pages of references, and the inventor must send copies of these to the patent office. Please correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the patent examiner has to acknowledge that he has read all of them and concluded that the art presented in the patent application was not anticipated by others in any of these references. I would suggest that an upper bound be placed on the number of such references commensurate with the time that is allowed for the examiner to study them. Is it possible that the implicit decision by the examiner regarding these references could be used by the inventor in subsequent litigation? Again, I believe that an upper bound should be placed on the number of references cited in a patent. I would also suggest that each reference must be cited in the patent as is already done in scholarly work to prevent "padding".
mhagman, From many of the patents I've seen granted that are not only obvious, but painfully obvious, and the same going for prior art, it seems there are major problems at the patent office that end up in court for prolonged periods of time. I still feel many, many patents should never have been granted, in not the vast majority. I'm sure a google search of junk patents would be more than interesting and extremely time consuming due to shear number. The patent office has very serious problems and a good patent office and process should be made an international priority for everyone would benefit.
