Patent Office Ignores Law - Right out of Pendulum of Justice
In Pendulum of Justice, Hank Rangar’s patent application is undermined by the evil director of the Patent Office. This court case, eVideo v. U.S.A. (Ct. Fed. Clm. 2015), shows that the Patent Office had a secret program to deep-six certain patent applications
Pendulum of Justice- no longer fiction.
Is there no government agency uninfected by cronies? (rhet.)
Regards,
O.A.
Reagan may have been about "trickle down economics."
Appears that the Obama regime's departmental and agency legacy shall be about "trickle down corruption" as long as lib spin meisters are not the ones writing the history books.
If the whole sum of this rancid regime had a smell we would all be gagging.
Uh, on second thought, surely you're not saying it's all his fault.
My opinion is that the program was used to manipulate the patent process to deny patents to invention the PTO did not want to explain. However, it is possible it was also used to favor certain large companies.
Failure to respond to FOIA requests by claiming they don't have documents requested or no longer have them is a typical ploy to hide information. It is true that they don't have to create new documents for a request, but they are supposed to do an honest search and aren't allowed to destroy documents or otherwise hide them. Another ploy is to claim that records are "archived" and demand huge fees to pay bureaucrats to allegedly search, with no guarantee of "finding" anything.
They have lots of roadblocks used to illegally thwart requests for activities they are hiding and deny even though you have other evidence of their existence. The National Park Service has denied the existence of planning documents that I knew existed because portions had leaked out.
The eVideo case seems to have had an extreme delay of a decade without a decision. Could have been some effort to keep it off the market. Supposedly, the USPTO had decided that so few applications were found to be sensitive or disapproved under the SAWS that the program was discontinued in 2015. I doubt that the program was instituted for political reasons to stop or delay inventions from going to market. More likely just a bureaucratic need to make things more difficult.
"Things that might not work", to say the least, like anti-gravity and perpetual motion machines don't seem to fit the phrase "potentially sensitive applications".
There are specific exemptions for some kinds of documents but the bureaucrats have a history of straining them to hide what they don't want to release. Using FOIA to get information from a recalcitrant agency is both an art and a science, and can come down to eventually threatening to sue or suing by a lawyer with expertise in FOIA in addition to your own.
Before getting that serious legally, you can also ask your Congressman (if you still have one) to inquire as to why they are ignoring a straightforward, reasonable request for information.
My FOIA question was what was the basis for the PTO assuming that the US patent office had lower quality than say the European Patent Office. I wanted the US PTO to have to justify their actions and their policy of quality equals rejections.
Believe it or not it was not fun to explain why patent applications that you told your clients should issue were being rejected. Not to mention that it is no fun arguing with people who are so illogical that they will tell you green is red with a straight face.
Government agencies have taken on a life of their own in ways that most people don't believe is possible in this country. When confronting it for the first time they tend to think that the problem they have is so obviously wrong that someone else, such as their lawyer, can simply push a button and make it go away, then are stunned when they find out it doesn't work that way and that the injustices really do happen in this country.
A lot of otherwise normal people happen to work for government agencies they don't run. Sometimes you can get more information informally from a sympathetic employee you happen to talk to than from FOIA. Starting off with a FOIA request often puts an agency into bunker mentality mode.
Sometimes you can happen to more informally talk to a government employee who understands what is going on and sympathizes with you, letting out more than he is "supposed" to, but who is still constrained in what he can say because he doesn't know you. That may or may not be what led to the hints that you were digging into something political and so needed to reformulate your request.
Relations with sympathetic government employees can sometimes be cultivated over time, with care because they feel threatened, too. (I have occasionally gotten late night phone calls in the form "I saw your name in the newspaper and shouldn't be telling you this and am afraid of losing my job, but ...", but that's another story.)
But if your question was literally what was the basis for low quality, that isn't a request for documents they have. It is unlikely that agency documents would explicitly call for 'lower quality', and putting it that way would only set them off. Maybe that is what the person meant by telling you to modify the request. It would be interesting if you could post the actual text of your request here.
Trying to use FOIA to get at documents with queries relying on inferences that require government agencies to acknowledge to themselves their own failings or corruption in the form of what they think is a 'when did you stop beating your wife' question isn't likely to work. It requires more direct requests for documents based on your own expert knowledge of the agency and what it has been doing.
That can be very tedious and time-consuming with multiple follow-ups trying to pin them down while hoping for an honest government worker who happens to get your FOIA request before it becomes too internally politicized to let them do their job.
1) Congress steals the fees that inventors pay to the PTO so it does not have the budget to hire enough examiners. This is criminal.
2) The examiners are unionized
3) The Supreme Ct has no idea what an invention is or what property rights are so they create arcane standards that no one can understand to hide their ignorance.
For more information on the bureaucratic gov't, I highly recommend: "Michael Glennon’s National Security and Double Government explains why U.S. foreign policy is prone to recurring failure and resistant to genuine reform. Instead of being responsive to citizens or subject to effective checks and balances, U.S. national security policy is in fact conducted by a shadow government of bureaucrats and a supporting network of think tanks, media insiders, and ambitious policy wonks. Presidents may come and go, but the permanent national security establishment inevitably defeats their efforts to chart a new course."
Glennon, Michael J.. National Security and Double Government . Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Although emphasizing the effects on Foreign Policy and National Security, The Double (Shadow) Gov't discussed exists in all areas of our gov'ts and damages all aspects of our lives.
As an aside, after reading the complaint filed with the court, I wonder why there's no attempt to go after lost business opportunity? Because it's too speculative or hard to quantify, or is it precluded legally?
Thanks for the book tip I always say that term limits have to apply to bureaucrats as much or more than members of congress.
I think the lost business opportunity seems to make sense, however the government is insulated from this and probably any monetary damages except possible the fees they received.
Txs for the reference, and the Post.
Frustrating!
Still haven't caught up on my reading list DB...but I will get to your stuff my friend.
Most of these patents had to do with computers.