“The Venetian Court”

First: I am not on duty at present, and not speaking for the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

There was a patent attorney and science fiction writer named Charles Harness, who was still alive when I started working at the Patent Office back in 1998; I wondered whether I might deal with a case of his, but I never did, and according to something I found online, he had retired from legal work by that time.

On Monday, I was reminded of a Charles Harness story that appeared in Analog decades ago, “The Venetian Court.” The reason is that we received a communication from management that an inventor has to be a natural person, not an AI, so the Patent Office will not issue a patent to ChatGPT; it may issue a patent to John Smith and Rosalind Jones, even if the two inventors made use of artificial intelligence in developing their invention. Again, I’m not speaking for the USPTO, and what I say here should not be relied upon.

In “The Venetian Court,” big corporations had locked up inventions by having computers process information on, for example, all chemicals that might have value as drugs, and obtain patents on them. (I’m going by memory, and there was more to the story than this background.) So it seems that real-life patent policy will save the country from the situation which a science fiction author envisioned, and did not like.

The Red Queen’s Race

There were no non-RCE amendments this week, so I’m still at zero amendments on my Amended docket, but two applicants filed Requests for Continued Examination, which went to my Regular New docket, so I had an oldest non-RCE Regular New, and an oldest RCE Regular New case this week.

I finished Office Actions on both of them. I also did a minor Office Action on yet another Regular New, that one being a written restriction requirement, which means that I told the applicant, “You have two inventions here, and searching both would be an unreasonable burden on the examiner, so choose which one you want examined this time.” Whichever the applicant doesn’t choose now, he can file a divisional application on.

I have also started searching for prior art relevant to yet another Regular New application, but haven’t gotten very far with it.