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The USPTO is incompetent | 265 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
The USPTO is incompetent
Authored by: PJ on Friday, April 12 2013 @ 04:41 PM EDT
You are leaving out of the equation the simple
truth that most patents dn't make any money at
all. They are not used by anyone, and they are
not used to sue anyone, and no one buys them.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

The USPTO is incompetent
Authored by: IMANAL_TOO on Friday, April 12 2013 @ 05:13 PM EDT
You wrote "On average"

The average is a wide topic in itself and may be the wrong tool here.

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Average

If you refer to the arithemtic mean, it is definitely the wrong tool:
"Many different descriptive statistics can be chosen as a measure of the central tendency of the data items. These include the arithmetic mean, the median, and the mode. Other statistics, such as the standard deviation and the range, are called measures of spread and describe how spread out the data is.

The most common statistic is the arithmetic mean, but depending on the nature of the data other types of central tendency may be more appropriate. For example, the median is used most often when the distribution of the values is skewed with a small number of very high or low values, as seen with house prices or incomes. It is also used when extreme values are likely to be anomalous or less reliable than the other values (e.g. as a result of measurement error), because the median takes less account of extreme values than the mean does."
and from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki /Arithmetic_mean
"While the arithmetic mean is often used to report central tendencies, it is not a robust statistic, meaning that it is greatly influenced by outliers. Notably, for skewed distributions, the arithmetic mean may not accord with one's notion of "middle", and robust statistics such as the median may be a better description of central tendency."

See also http://en.wikipe dia.org/wiki/Measure_of_central_tendency

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Geometric_mean

Averages can be a complex field as you also may need to identify which underlying distribution your data has. That can be tough. If patent return is random, you may have a Poisson distribution

http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Poisson_distribution.

In probability theory and statistics, the Poisson distribution (pronounced [pwasɔ̃]) is a discrete probability distribution that expresses the probability of a given number of events occurring in a fixed interval of time and/or space if these events occur with a known average rate and independently of the time since the last event.[1] The Poisson distribution can also be used for the number of events in other specified intervals such as distance, area or volume.

For instance, suppose someone typically gets 4 pieces of mail per day on average. There will be, however, a certain spread: sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less, once in a while nothing at all.[2] Given only the average rate, for a certain period of observation (pieces of mail per day, phonecalls per hour, etc.), and assuming that the process, or mix of processes, that produces the event flow is essentially random, the Poisson distribution specifies how likely it is that the count will be 3, or 5, or 10, or any other number, during one period of observation. That is, it predicts the degree of spread around a known average rate of occurrence.
Hard to tell, but good luck!

BTW, all of these statistics can be calculated readily using R, as found at www.r-project.org/ .



---
______
IMANAL


.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

A non-US person's thought
Authored by: Anonymous on Saturday, April 13 2013 @ 05:48 AM EDT
I have begun to form the opinion that the whole mess gives an impression that
the objective might be to fatten the wallets of lawyers.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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