Indecipherable patents?

Patently-O has some discussion of indecipherable patents:

You can write a patent application today that is almost indecipherable, and you’ve got a good chance of getting it out of the patent office with a patent.

I suspect that it is possible that one can write a patent application with poorly defined claims and get it allowed. The question for patent reform is whether the "indecipherable patent" is a frequent problem, or whether this is a sound byte problem, like the patent of Smucker on the sealed, crustless sandwich.

Merely for consideration, contemplate the first claim of Joe Hosteny's US 6,206,000, Canine scuba diving apparatus, issued March 27, 2001:

An underwater self-contained breathing apparatus for use by a canine, comprising:

a transparent rigid helmet having a skirted opening for the wearer's neck, the helmet being sufficiently large to avoid contact with the face or nose of the canine user;

a regulator for supplying a breathable gas attached to the helmet;

a means of adjusting a position of a demand valve in the regulator to pressurize the helmet at no less than ambient pressure;

a harness attached to the helmet;

means for fastening the harness around the wearer's torso; and

one or more pockets in the harness for receiving ballast weights.

For such an obscure invention, the claim looks pretty straightforward and easily understood. Not even close to indecipherable.

Throughout this blog, I have included claims from various patents. I don't think they rise to the level of indecipherable. I even included claims in the text of a law review,
Lawrence B. Ebert,
PATENT GRANT RATES AT THE UNITED STATES PATENT AND TRADEMARK OFFICE, 4 CHI.-KENT J. INTELL. PROP. 108 (2004).

Examples of claim language from a different Chicago firm -->An apparatus for controlling a transmission power of a base transceiver station (BTS) in a CDMA mobile communication system, comprising:

a central processing unit (CPU) for receiving a command to perform a power control operation and for generating power control signal in response to the establishment or removal of a repeater;

a gain controller for outputting a gain signal in accordance with the CPU power control signal; and

a gain variable amplifier for regulating the entire transmission power of the BTS by varying its gain according to the gain signal of the gain controller.

***

An isolated nucleic acid molecule comprising a nucleotide sequence selected from the group consisting of:

(a) the nucleotide sequence as set forth in SEQ ID NO: 1;

(b) a nucleotide sequence encoding the polypeptide as set forth in SEQ ID NO: 2;

(c) a nucleotide sequence corresponding to nucleotide position number 181 to 795 in SEQ ID NO:1;

(d) a nucleotide sequence which hybridizes to any of (a) or (c) under conditions of 50% formamide, 50 mM potassium phosphate, pH 6.5; 5× SSC; 1%SDS; 5× Denhardt's; 0.05% sodium sarcosyl; and 300 μg/ml salmon sperm DNA at 42° C. overnight and washed to a final stringency of 1× SSC, 0.1% SDS and 42° C., wherein the nucleotide sequence encodes a polypeptide fragment having an activity of regulating JNK activation or modulating JNK signal mediated signal transduction; and

(e) a nucleotide sequence complementary to any of (a)-(c).

***

A isolated nucleic acid comprising a nucleotide sequence encoding a human hiwi gene having a necleotide [?] sequence that encodes the amino acid sequence identified by SEQ ID NO.2.


***

A hand-held electronic device for use in accessing and displaying data that is stored in compressed form, wherein when uncompressed, the data includes a series of words, and wherein each of the words is sized according to a multiple of a common unit of memory storage, the hand-held electronic device comprising:

a display for displaying information;

a processor;

a memory;

tokenized data stored in the memory, wherein the tokenized data comprises word and phrase tokens, wherein each of the word tokens represents a unique word in the data, wherein each of the word tokens is sized according to the common unit of memory storage regardless of the size of the unique word, wherein each of the phrase tokens represent a unique sequence of the word tokens in the tokenized data, wherein the phrase tokens are associated to the unique sequence in response to locating at least one repeated unique sequence of word tokens in the tokenized data and wherein each of the phrase tokens is sized according to a given multiple of the common unit of memory storage;

a word dictionary table-stored in the memory, wherein the one word dictionary comprises the word tokens and their corresponding unique words; and

a phrase dictionary stored in the memory, wherein the phrase dictionary table comprises the phrase tokens and their corresponding word tokens;

wherein a data access routine stored in the memory and executable by the processor is operable to receive an input, and responsive to the input, display a portion of the data by decompressing the tokenized data using the word and phrase dictionaries.

[assigned to Snap-on]

***

A local area network system utilizing a plurality of discrete multitone (DMT) remote units in communication with a central office providing digital subscriber line service comprising:

a DMT transceiver central office unit;

a master DMT transceiver remote unit connected to a local area network, wherein the master DMT transceiver remote unit provides a local area network timing reference for at least one other DMT transceiver remote unit when the DMT transceiver central office unit is not available;

a set of DMT carriers providing a DMT communication link between the DMT transceiver central office unit and the master DMT transceiver remote unit;

a slave DMT transceiver remote unit connected to the local area network; and

a set of local area network carriers providing a local area network communication link between the slave DMT transceiver remote unit and the master DMT transceiver remote unit using timing derived from the set of DMT carriers providing a communication link between the master DMT transceiver remote unit and the DMT transceiver central office unit when the DMT transceiver central unit is available.

***
A method for querying a trajectory of a moving object, the method comprising:

obtaining a sequence of expected locations for the moving object including a starting paint, a destination paint and intermediate points;

computing a temporal-spatial path along which the moving object travels from the starting point through the intermediate points to the destination point;

creating a trajectory for the moving object, wherein the trajectory defines permissible spatial and temporal uncertainties in actual locations of the moving object relative to expected locations of the moving object along the temporal-spatial path; and

performing a query on the trajectory in order to determine location information about the moving object.