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Why inventors make such lousy students.

Well not all of them, though a great many inventors were and are treated badly in school, find out more with the following:

We like to say that inventors learn easy but teach hard. Inventors are bored easily and are distracted even easier. Inventors are also noted for becoming hyper focused on projects and ideas and can learn anything related to their goals when they set their minds to it.

Educators generally agree that most people are divided into two groups of thinkers: divergent and convergent. Creative people mostly fall into the divergent thinker group. The convergent thinker is able to focus on concepts and tasks that send the divergent thinker into la la land. Reading is often difficult for the divergent thinker. We believe that divergence or convergence in thinking is a matter of hard wiring not environment. While educators understand this phenomenon they do effectively nothing about it.

The internet is loaded with data concerning divergent and convergent thinkers. Have a look.

Public and private education is a war of attrition. The object is to weed out the dumb people, allowing the smart ones to proceed. Since the universal educational model is biased against the divergent thinker and favors the convergent thinker it's the latter who prosper within this system and for whom opportunities abound.

Thomas Edison was kicked out of grade school for being "addled and dim witted". His mother took over with home schooling. Edison is considered to have been a classic divergent thinker. In fact, divergent thinking is often called "The Edison trait" by educators.

Teachers, especially the ones that went on to become text book authors, have created and fostered this unfair system.

Three of the greatest inventors the world has ever seen, Edison, Percy Spencer and Bill Lear never made it past elementary school. Being mostly self-educated, they learned what they needed to know when they needed to know it. Spencer and Lear learned electronics as radio men while in the U.S. Navy. Edison was a telegraph operator and as such became obsessed with electricity.

All text books should incorporate mnemonic devices.

Mnemonic devices are the leprous, pimp-sired lackeys of learning. The only thing more powerful than the stench these things give off to the educational intelligentsia is the crystalline beauty of their ease of use and perfect reliability in planting retrievable data into almost any human brain.

At the present time, we see mnemonic devices used in two main arenas of learning: the military and in the cramming of medical students. The Army's motto is "Leave no one behind". The unspoken motto of the medical student is "don't get left behind". There have been acrostic sentences (a kind of mnemonic) written for just about every part of the human body. A physician student of ours told us a filthy acrostic sentence that teaches the 12 cranial nerves, that once heard is impossible to un-learn.

The army had so many acronyms that the GI's of World War II wrote their own: snafu. Once I saw Norman Schwarzkopf doing an interview concerning maters military. He rattled off two acronyms that had to do with military preparedness and in doing so, sounded more like a grunt than a 4 star general. It was refreshing.

Mnemonic devices are our first stringers in delivering our students to the patent law "moment of clarity". In much the same way a car jack allows the average human to pick up and hold a 4000 pound automobile, mnemonic devices help us all pick up and hold strange sometimes boring words, often in lists. Making connections with these words is not the problem for the divergent thinker, it's uploading the data and circumventing the "gate keeper". The gate keeper is what we call that part of the divergent thinking human brain that says "this is boring, you have no need to know this and you're not going to learn it, because I'm not going to let you". There is an upside to the gate keeper who sometimes tells us "we're going to remember this, never mind why".

Lesson 1 comes with an audio CD to help you read patents and to guide you through the patent search system at the United States Patent and Trademark Office's web site.

Learning patent law is like learning anything else, you must arrive at a core understanding, a "moment of clarity" as we call it. If the average inventor knew as much about patenting as he or she knew about baseball it would never occur to them to use a patent practitioner in the writing, filing or prosecution of patent applications. The fundamental rules of patenting are not as complicated as the rules of baseball and nowhere near as complicated as those of, ironically enough, Monopoly®. Take the mini lesson to see if you can cut it. We think you can.

It is therefore not hard to understand why the patent professional crafted "inventor aids" don't work for the creative individual. When patent lawyers try to teach inventors do you know what happens? Worlds collide. It's because patent lawyers are from Mars....and.... inventors are from Pluto.

Here's out take on the following: or in patent jargon:

BACKGROUND OF THE PRIOR ART

Patent It Yourself, by David Pressman, NOLO Press

"Every step of the patent process is presented in order in this gem of a book, complete with official forms..."

The San Francisco Chronicle

"The best roll-up-your-sleeves guide for filers who don't want to pay a ransom."

Inc. Magazine

"A pedagogical disaster." Bill Guess

"This work is so obscure, that it has been supposed to be written in cipher, and that it is necessary to read it upwards and downwards, or backwards and forwards, as it happens, to make head or tail of it. The effect is exceedingly like the qualms produced by the heaving of a ship becalmed at sea; the motion is so tedious, improgressive, and sickening."* William Hazlitt from a criticism of an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

*We found this gem surfing the web for the definition to our motto "omni ignotum pro magnifico est" "All things unknown seem grand".

Sickening indeed, the first thing I learned about with Patent It Yourself was clinical depression. I learned about it the hard way. In 1997 I decided to do something about my inventions. I bought around a ton of carbon steel, 800 pounds of 1/4 inch tempered glass, sub fractional gear motors, a new mig to replace my stick welder, and a bunch of other stuff with which to build my invention. I figured I'd patent it myself with the help of Pressman's book, which I dutifully purchased. I couldn't read it. I found myself bogged down to the axles in Chapter 1. What I could read I didn't understand. Enormous amounts of information that I didn't get. I felt inadequate and bummed out. I tried reading patents but couldn't. Who was I trying to kid, I thought, I'm just a welder. .......Then I gave up.

Or at least I thought I did. Subconsciously, my inventors determination kicked in and I started poking around the web. My salvation. One day I happened upon Cornell University Law School's LII web site and found a Supreme Court Patent Case: Aronson v. Quick Point Pencil Co. I figured what could it hurt? Maybe I can read this. At this point I was desperate. After reading this case summary I knew what I needed to do. It took two years from that point but I did it. I learned enough about patent law to at least get a handle on it. And slow "as molasses in January", I learned how to read patents. These are separate skills, by the way, that by the end of lesson 3 you will have acquired. This should take you about 3 to 6 months if you take your time, which we recommend.

BACK TO Patent It Yourself.

One problem with this so called "inventors Bible" with regard to teaching someone how to write a patent application is that this "Bible" starts with "Revelation" (the search) and ends with "Genesis" (the claim). Wrong way. Searching through documents that you can't read and understand is viciously counterproductive, though sadly this is where inventors are almost always sent first, usually with terminal results. Plus, patents contain a treasure trove of "stealable" contents. You can't steal what you can't read. David Pressman tells you essentially to read through the book, skimming over some sections, then to go back through and follow the directions. Keep reading and you'll learn how long it took me to read and skim my way through this book.

I've spoken to a great many inventors that own a copy of Patent It Yourself, and not one could tell me the patentability requirements of Title 35, sections 101, 102 and 103. The is the equivalent in base ball to: three strikes your out, four balls and your on, and with a safe hit you're also, at least, on first base.

Probably the biggest problem with Patent It Yourself is it's centerpiece: the bagel bag clip patent, U.S. # 4783886. Why, ..why, ...why, of all the patents in the world, why this one to teach the novice how to read a patent? Some time ago I heard that they were thinking of using electrical linear motors on aircraft carriers to fling jets off the deck, replacing the steam catapults. The linear motor device is what they are using on some amusement park rides (Superman- Magic Mountain). Large rare earth permanent magnets, beefy stators (what ever those are ) and lots of electricity sling the amusement ride cars down the track using some kind of fancy high speed switching.

Aircraft Carrier With Magnetically Driven Linear Motor Airplane Launch Assist Device. THAT patent would be easier for the novice to read, if done simply (yet still be good enough to get the job done at the patent office), than the bagel bag clip patent. OK, let's see, you have a hull, some bulkheads, a flight deck, at least one nuclear reactor powering a steam turbine geared to the screws and to an electrical power generator, a couple of controllable rudders, the linear motor thing nestled into the flight deck wired up to the electrical power, a hook for the plane, the controls for the boat and the "go" switch for the linear motor. Got it? Nuke up a nice head of steam, point the flat top into the wind, hook up an F14 to the linear motor hook, lock down the brakes, throttle up the jets, get everybody out of the way...then...let her rip! That's pretty much it, isn't it? Once you're through with lesson 3 you'll be able to provide drawings and write the patent application for that humongous invention. Size doesn't matter with patents. Also one needn't know Ohms law from "Burkes Law" in order to write that patent.

The bagel bag clip patent deals with interrelated shapes and shapes are how patent lawyers really show off. [Ego is the relentless, pernicious corruptor of education.] You wouldn't want six patent lawyers (blind or otherwise) to describe the sections of an elephant. 99.99 percent of the English speaking world wouldn't know what the hell they were talking about. I gave up on trying to read the bagel bag clip patent years ago. Not too long ago after having done much of my own patent work, I returned to it and forced myself to read it. We break it down in Lesson 2 and in doing so for all of us that have agonized over this patent, if only for a few minutes, at least then, we'll finally be able to get some closure. By the time you get to Lesson 2 you'll be ready.

Patents For Beginners, by David Pressman and Richard Stim, NOLO Press.

Mainly excerpts from Patent It Yourself in a physically smaller version. Some at patentlessons.com were worried that they might steal our thunder with this one. Others of us realized there was no way they could dumb down to the level necessary (we were right). This is the most bazaar attempt at simplifying a large complicated book that we've ever seen.

NOLO (have you ever wondered what this word means, it's not English, of any variety) advertises that their do it yourself patent law guides are written in "plain English". Early on I thought "If this is plain English then I'm just plain stupid." In the first place, it's not true. Plain English is what lawyers use when they get drunk and gossip, go fishing, cuss out their gardener, get their hair cut, etc. Not the case with these books. We can prove it. In Patent It Yourself, David Pressman tells us that the patent claim is "definitely a term of art". He provides no definition for the phrase "term of art". And, I for one, didn't know what it meant. Color me dumb if you like, but I had no idea. The phrase wasn't in my unabridged dictionary and that bugged me. Ask some of your non-lawyer friends what the phrase "term of art" means.

One night I was watching, on TV, the movie The Judge taken from a novel by the same title, written by a guy named Martini. I had tried to read this book some time ago because I am a fan of my fellow Mississippian John Grissom's legal thrillers and figured this one might be good. I was wrong. I got about a third the way through it and bailed. So I figured the movie might be easier to take and was watching it to see how the story ended. I bailed on the movie also. Knowing how this thing ended wasn't worth the pain of the journey.

So here I am watching The Judge. Early on in it, the judge in question gets arrested for solicitation. A female policewoman/decoy was used to snare johns from the street. In a murder trial that follows (the lady cop/decoy, ends up dead and the judge is accused) the arresting officer is describing the solicitation bust. On the stand, the policeman testifies that during the sting, the judge/defendant negotiated the price for a "half and half". And in the movie (not in the book) the trial judge interrupts and asks the policeman, " Sergeant, would you care to define that "term of art" for the ladies and gentleman of the jury?" I was pissed. The next morning I drove to Claitor's Law Books store here in Baton Rouge and asked the lady at the counter if they sold a legal dictionary. In the parking lot I finished reading the definition for the entry: "term of art". This critically important legal phrase appears in no other type of dictionary that I've seen. That's not what I'd call "plain English". This is but one example. Is the bagel bag clip patent written in "plain English"? Not to me it isn't. Anyway "plain English" serves no purpose with this stuff it's the "flavored English" that you'll need to learn. That's where we come in.

Patents for Beginners

We feel sorry for these little books and believe each and every one is destined for a long, lonely shelf life.

"Day after day, day after day

stuck, nor breath nor motion

as idle as a painted ship

upon a painted ocean" Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Unbelievably the bagel bag clip patent returns in Patents for Beginners, but with a twist. Due to an obvious transcription error, the next to the last paragraph of this patent, as printed in our copy, consists of gibberish. Even the proof reader skipped over this thing. Normally it would be considered inexcusably cavalier for a publisher to make a mistake of this magnitude in a book called Patents for Beginners in a chapter entitled "Reading and writing patents" with this being the only patent in it, only it's of no consequence. It's an almost certainty that no beginner, and therefore no one reading this book will ever get this far into this patent. Not only that, where are the claims? This patent is incomplete as printed in our copy.

Some years back I was watching The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. Johnny had, as a guest, Dean Martin. After the usual introductory banter Johnny asked Dean, "Say, Dean I understand you just finished a book." "That's right" Dean Martin replied, "Took me a year. But you know what Johnny? I enjoyed it so much, I think I'll read another one next year". It took me three years to read Patent It Yourself, and according to David Pressman that's how long it took him to write it.

The most important statement in Patent It Yourself is a quotation credited to the Mrs. Pressman. "Getting started is the hardest part". That phrase stuck with me and once I decided to learn about patents and patenting, I made it happen. And once I wrote the first sentence in each section of each of my applications the rest flowed. Or, as the old blind guy says to young Cain in the TV show Kung Fu, "He who seeks the path, has found it, Grasshopper."

If you have a copy of Patent it Yourself, hang on to it. After finishing lesson 3 it'll be a breeze. Also if you don't have a copy of Patent It Yourself, after completing lesson 3, you might want to get one. After all, the bill you'll incur while exchanging pleasantries with an "on the clock" patent professional during the drafting, filing, prosecution to issue of a patent should pay for this information crammed book and our lessons 1 - 3.

So far we've counted 11 mistakes in this book. Of note is one in the highlighted box called "The Patent Laws" in chapter 5. He refers to the "five statutory patent clauses". Our understanding is that there are a lot more than that. Also in chapter 10, regarding the crosshairs on the drawing sizes we believe 1.5 cm converts to .5" not .05". We point out the rest in Lesson 2. The troubling characteristic of these mistakes is not their severity it's their longevity (over multiple editions).

There is one serious mistake in Patent It Yourself in at least editions 5 and 8 and probably those in between. In Chapter 9 the sample independent claim for "concrete" is improperly drafted. This claim would be rejected at the patent office or if allowed to grant would be unenforceable due to Section 112 issues. We may be wrong about this, but we don't think so.

Note: I've gotten emails asking me to point out the mistakes in the "concrete" patent:

Here are some of them:

First let's look at it, as written:

(I claim) A rigid building and paving material comprising a mixture of sand and stones, and a hardened cement binder filling the interstices between and adhering to sand and stones, whereby a hardened, rigid, and strong matrix for building and paving will be provided.

First of all, the first time I read this claim I was attacked by the mental nausea that comes to me when reading a word like "interstices" for the first time, as was the case with the above. It's a weird sort of queasy-ness that boils up behind the eyes and pushes down toward the windpipe. It's not pleasant. Interstices is one of those pesky Middle English words patents are littered with that we teach in Lesson 3. (Why Johnny Can't Read Patents). Interstices means intervening spaces. .

Let's jump ahead to the patent office: this claim, as written, would receive a Title 35 112(b) rejection for being indefinite. The rejection might read: "the claim is rejected as there is no antecedent recitation for the limitation "interstices". So what the heck is an antecedent recitation? It means something that you said earlier.

Here's an example: Let's say the captain, executive officer and the ship's surgeon from the U.S. Starship Enterprise beam down to earth. They're having lunch here in Baton Rouge at a local eatery. After perusing the menu the captain motions for the waitress, who walks up and asks, "What'll ya have boys?"

The captain orders a shrimp poboy. The exec orders a club sandwich. The ship's surgeon orders the daily- special plate lunch (it's a Monday so it's red beans and rice, always the case in south Louisiana, always). The waitress asks the doc: "What kind of salad dressing would you like on your salad?" He responds with another question, "What kind do you have?" The waitress answers, "Lite vinaigrette, house Italian, blue cheese, ranch and thousand island."

"Great" he says, "I'll have the honey mustard".

"BONES you idiot, they don't have honey mustard". the captain blurts out.

"Huh?"

Spock intervenes: "Dr. McCoy, while I can't confirm Captain Kirks statement, your order was illogical in that there was no antecedent recitation for the type of salad dressing you ordered, namely: "honey mustard". "Dr. McCoy, are you feeling all right?"

Notice that Dr. McCoy said "the honey mustard". Illogical.

If you write a patent claim you must include all the pieces and parts that you plan on referring to later when using the definite article "the" as in "the interstices". Some of my students ask me "Wouldn't there be "interstices" or spaces between the grains of sand and between the individual stones, you know, the little teensy weensy ones." Of course, but that's not how you make concrete. Creating "concrete" that way would require a team of nano stucco artists. Again, concrete is not made this way.

A rigid building and paving material comprising a mixture of sand and stones, and a hardened cement binder filling the interstices between and adhering to sand and stones, whereby a hardened, rigid, and strong matrix for building and paving will be provided.

Here's another oops: read the claim again and pay attention to the second time the words "sand and stones" appear. What sand and stones? Patent claims require "affirmative recitation" and so one should say "a quantity of stones" and "an amount of sand" to make these claim elements proper. Is this a generic phrase as in: "I plan on filling some bags with ballast for my balloon ride, though I can't decide between sand and stones." This is not proper patent claim grammar. Again, you don't just say "stones" you must recite "a plurality of stones" or avoid the word "plurality" by using the phrase "a quantity of gravel". But again, no patent claim would ever have the phrase "adhering to sand and stones". Never......Never. Patent claims are part of a patent "specification". Notice the root word "specific". Patent lawyers often consider the specification and claims as being separate. I don't see it that way, nor does the Patent Act read that way: Title 35 Section 112 (b).

Another thing, in this example you would not claim concrete to be a matrix. An online dictionary defines matrix as "material in which something is enclosed or embedded". My unabridged at home even includes a "cement" definition under the word matrix, and states that hardened cement forms a matrix for binding and supporting a quantity of aggregate (sand and gravel). So describing concrete as a matrix is incorrect as stated in the "whereby" part of the claim. The Middle English "whereby" also made me queasy the first 20 or so times I read it. These sensations pass with time. IF the concrete were reinforced with steel, the concrete could then be considered a matrix. In concrete the hardened cement is the matrix.

So to be a matrix the concrete would have to enclose and encase something as with reinforced concrete or as with "concrete galoshes", especially if the "galoshes" were formed using a single wash tub.

The whereby clause is probably not a patent buster, having no antecedent basis (another way to put "lacks antecedent recitation" ) for "the interstices" component is. Even if the patent office was asleep at the switch and the patent grants, that claim would be ruled invalid in any court case later.

So what would be the correct patent claim for "concrete"? Sorry, that's on the lesson 2 writing assignment.

What I can tell you is that a composition of matter claim wouldn't be the best type of claim to use. A process claim followed by a product by process claim would be much better. Mainly because in the above claim an important component of concrete is missing: air.... 6% by volume, especially when you consider that the cement only makes up 11%. I found this stuff out at the portcement.org web site.

OK, we're getting way ahead of ourselves with all this stuff. But I was told to put up or shut up about the above disaster of a patent claim. It took me three years to spot these mistakes. You'll be able to spot them after lesson 3(six months if you take your time).

I went on a search to find pictures of the Star Trek crew and found something much more interesting. I had no earthly idea the world had so many pets named Spock.

OK lets get back on task.

The biggest "clam" in any of my NOLO books (I'm actually a good customer of theirs) belongs to my copy of the 3rd edition of Represent Yourself In Court. I'm embarrassed to say how long it took me to try and make sense of the sample complaint in Chapter 3 before realizing that was an impossibility. This one's pathetic.

Regarding the software that crank out patent applications both provisional and regular: what an absurd notion. When we see computer programs that write: movies, novels, advice columns, short stories, sitcom scripts, rap lyrics, nasty limericks, or the instructions on soup cans we'll believe this is possible. To paraphrase the late Edsger Dijkstra...Computers will start thinking when submarines start swimming.

Also do these computer aids prosecute your application? Is there a "means clause" button. Do they have Markman warnings that start to flash? How about Festo? "Looks like you need a Markush group? Want one?" Is there a way to input the prior art so as to better "automatically" claim the available intellectual property? Patent "software" needs to be between your ears, our job is putting it there.

We've seen one patent lawyer trolling the internet that's a sort of IP Dominatrix. He tells you your ideas suck.... for a fee. Your and our ideas might very well suck, but WE need to be the ones to determine that from our own knowledge and understanding not others'.

Oh well, they say that a small percentage of the population uses almost all of the lawyers due to the high price, therefore you can't blame some lawyers for doing a little bottom fishing. The fish cruising the bottom may be "full of bones" and ugly in the face, but when caught in numbers then gutted, scaled and fried, can provide supplemental and even sustainable protein.

Catostomus commersoni (common name: the North American white sucker)