The Red Queen’s Race

I got one amendment on my Amended docket this week, and wrote an Office Action in response, so I’m back to having zero amendments.

I finished an Office Action on my oldest Regular New case early this week, and then finished an Office Action on a different Regular New application Friday evening; I was definitely hungry for my dinner by the time I was finished, so I ate, and treated myself to a small glass of tawny port with dessert, to celebrate making production for the biweek.

Little Oddities

I was searching a case, maybe last week or a week or two before that, when I noticed a U.S. patent issued to a Saudi Arabian inventor. There are plenty of U.S. patents issued to Japanese, British, Korean, French, German, and Israeli inventors, but Saudis are uncommon.

In addition to rejecting claims as anticipated by, or obvious over, the prior art, we object to informalities in language. I had occasion to look up an Office Action I had written some ago in a related case, and saw that I had objected to a clause beginning with the word “which”, saying that it was ungrammatical, although it might have been considered correct in the eighteenth century. The usage was along the lines of “I have read Master and Commander, which it’s a novel about a Royal Navy officer and a physician during the Napoleonic Wars.” This not being the eighteenth century, I suggested a more standard “wherein” clause.