New Rules

The news rules for patent prosecution proposed by the Patent Office have been causing quite a stir for a long time, as illustrated by these articles here and here. The news rules would provide serious restrictions on how patent applications are filed and how patentable material is protected. The rules would certainly favor the Patent Office over the inventor and that is not a good thing. It seems that in the past, the Patent Office has been a bit more liberal about granting patents and then letting the market sort things out later. I am not opposed to this idea because the result is that only those patents truly worth something end up in the court system and it allows any inventor to at least have their chance at coming up with "the next big thing."