[emeritus]

Although I started my professional career as a design engineer, a series of circumstances led to me becoming first a patent examiner with the UK Patent Office and then a Patent Attorney (now long retired).

US patent law has always been different from the rest of the world. At one time, actual "reduction to practice" was indeed a requirement, but that was amended long ago so that "constructive reduction to practice" by means of an "enabling description" that (in theory) would allow the skilled person to construct a working embodiment from the paper description, is sufficient.

I fear that the standard of scrutiny of the description of embodiments on both sides of the pond has diminished somewhat since when I joined the patent profession in 1976. Basically, whereas the emphasis in the UK used to be on ensuring that the inventor had provided a teaching of how to carry out the invention (so that the public could freely use the invention once the patent had expired), the emphasis of examination is now directed to the claims that protect the invention (so that the public know what they cannot do while it is in force). Under the old UK 1949 Patents Act that I trained under, the examiner had to read the description from start to finish, checking that it made technical sense, comment of any obscurities and suggest amendments that would make things clearer, and then write a comprehensive abridgment of all its technical content for the benefit of the public. Amendment of the description of US patents has long been prohibited, one exception being the correction of errors of translation.

The present 1977 Patents Act, which was drafted to be consistent with the contemporaneous European Patent Act, changed things somewhat. Examiners no longer had to write abridgments as a (short and therefore often of little use) abstract had to provided by the applicant, and so the bean counters decided that the previous thorough scrutiny of the description was no longer necessary. When performance-related pay was introduced there was a positive incentive to comply: the longer you spent on a case, the fewer cases you would get through, the worse your performance and your prospects of promotion and/or performance bonuses.

Now when I joined the Patent Office in 1976, most of the examiners in my group were chartered engineers who had spent time in industry or Post Office Engineering before joining the Patent Office, and really knew their circuitry. At least one used to set HNC/HND-level electrical/electronic examination papers for technicians. In response to political pressures to cut costs and meet civil service manpower targets (regardless of the amount of work needing to be done), in the 1980's most of the experienced people who happened to be in the right age band took voluntary early retirement when it was offered on really advantageous terms that were too good not to take up ( to be replaced by cheaper inexperienced graduates a few years later), so that by the time I left in 1989 I was one of the last to have had any real experience in circuitry. As the higher management echelons became progressively occupied by people from outside who had no actual experience of examining but plenty with managementspeak, the thrust has been to progressively reduce the amount of intellectual effort required by examiners to increase "efficiency" and allow costs to be reduced even further. There was even a proposal a few years ago to change the law so that amendment of the description of a patent application should be disallowed so that examiners would not need to read it in any detail. This was never adopted (the law change at least. I don't know what current practice is!).

A similar sequence of changes apparently occurred in the US. In the 1990's I had a case where the US examiner had clearly not understood the invention. In the end I dealt with three different examiners, and got it granted as filed after 5 or 6 official actions. On discussing things with my counterpart in the US (also an ex-engineer), he observed that the US Patent Office had a high turn-over of examiners, who often used a stint of examining as a stepping-stone in qualifying as a patent attorney. Thus having applications examined by inexperienced people who did not understand the technology was unfortunately commonplace. I don't suppose things have improved any.

Apologies for rambling on, but I thought it might be useful to explain why it is that patents can get granted for things that, to the expert eyes of forum members, don't work. They might have been examined by people who have done their best, but were possibly out of their depth and probably incentivized to maximize throughput.

edit,

Just read the posts above, which appeared while I was composing. I don't want to stray overmuch from the topic of this thread, so will only observe that the little guy is always going to be disadvantaged by the cost of protection. Unless you file a patent application in China, you will have no protection there, and the Chinese will be free to manufacture and sell the goods in any country where you have not applied for protection yourself. Few people appreciate that Lego was actually invented by a British inventor who only applied for protection in the UK. Lego realised this and were therefore able to manufacture and sell their version legally throughout Europe and the rest of the world. I never had experience of patetn enfrocement in China, but was assured by those who had that it was no different in principle from attempting to enforce a US patent in Texas (where patent trials are by juries who normally decide in favour of a US-based party over a foreign party).