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US Patent Office Acknowledges Error in Judgment
Posted GMT
Alexandria, VA (HACT) -- In a press release which is likely further to destabilize the shaky ground upon which United States patent law stands, the US Patent Office admitted that 80% of its employees can neither read nor write.
"The United States Patent Office must regrettably inform all holders of patents granted between March 1, 1986 and the present day that these patents are now suspended indefinitely. We, the employees of the USPTO, are recommending ourselves to governmental investigation on the grounds that approximately four-fifths of our employees are functionally illiterate."
This news came as a shock to many of the literate patent workers, mostly interns, who reported that they had had no idea of the widespread problem.
"We were getting perfectly lucid-seeming declarations of no prior art on our desks," said Patent Office intern Bettina Sweet. "Everything seemed legit. We had no reason to doubt them."
"This explains the flood of unbelievably idiotic patents in recent years," remarked Samuel Raul Morokoff of Friendship Times Quarterly. "I'm a cynic myself, but even I would never have guessed they literally couldn't read the applications."
According to the press release, most of the workers were simply accepting patent applications without even checking for prior art, often dictating a fictitious document to one intern as a "transcript", then submitting it as a prior art claim to another intern, whose supervisor would reject it after oral consultation with the intern.
"Once in 2002 I found a $50 bill and a half-crushed pack of Twinkies in an envelope with an application for a software patent," said Pauline Grebbels, an intern for three years. "My supervisor just turned red and said, 'I wondered where I left that.' It seemed strange at the time but I didn't really give it much thought, even a week later when the patent was approved due to no prior art." The application was a patent for "a window-based computer operating system".
The Department of Commerce, to which the Patent Office belongs, said in a response that it was "sick about the news" and would be conducting "brutally in-depth investigations." The words "body cavity" appeared no less than six times in the response.
Dick Frunwell of the DoC added, "Clearing out the mess of patents granted in the last 18 years is going to take at least 18 years."
§(The HACT team produces humor and opinion articles, not official news. Any resemblance to actual news is just a matter of style.)