Patent It Yourself - PDF Archive

450 | Patent it YOURSELF
application. I favor legislation to overrule these irksome
decisions by specifying that patent claims shall be
construed to do substantial justice and not be invalidated
for minor errors and also require CAFC judges to have realworld
patent experience and be registered before the PTO.
Lastly, we could use legislation to simplify and loosen
the requirements of patent applications and amendments to
make things easier and cheaper for independent inventors.
Almost everyone trips over the new rules for presenting
claims in amendments, so much so that each Group in the
PTO now has a special person, called a Legal Instruments
Examiner, just to check amendments to make sure they’re
canonical (in the proper format). If not, they will make
you resubmit the amendment or part of it. Recently I filed
a PCT application which I thought was fine. However I
received a letter objecting to my submission as informal but
not telling me how to fix it. I had to call to find out what
was wrong. It turns out that the paper had an /S/ signature
(“/John Smith/”) but it didn’t have the signer’s name (“John
Smith”) typed again underneath the /S/ signature! I had to
resubmit the paper with the signer’s name typed twice: once
sandwiched between slashes and then without the slashes!
l