Patents, it is his duty to give authenticated copies to any person who shall demand the same ** on payment of the legal fees." Boyden v. Burke, 14 How. at 582.

"The application is a public record which the defendant and all others are presumed to know." Webster Loom Co. v. Higgins, 105 U. S. at 594.

"An adjudication in the case of a patent is not only a judgment inter partes, but is a judicial construction of a grant by the government, and in a broad sense deals with and determines the rights of the public. A patent is sui generis, by it the public, through its authorized representatives, grants a monopoly for a term of years in consideration of the surrender of the invention to public use upon expiration of the term." Electric Mfg. Co. v. Edison Electric Light Co., 61 Fed. at 837.

"It is a thoroughly settled rule that, as to patentability and the range of the claims in a patent, inasmuch as these matters concern the public at large, the court will not allow parties to frame their issues in such a way as to take from it the scrutiny of all the questions which may be involved." Millard v. Chase, 108 Fed. at 401.

"On the one hand, it is essential to the welfare of the country that inventors shall not be discouraged by narrow attitudes and interpretations when they have made a worthwhile contribution; but, on the other, the public is not to be deprived of the full enjoyment of what becomes rightfully theirs because the advance is a mere improvement, or, if more than that, because, through no fault of theirs, the inventor has not made full and clear disclosure, or has failed to obtain a contract with the government which defines what he may later claim." Kintner v. Atlantic Communication Co. 230 Fed. at 830.

"The public has an interest in having the validity of the patent established, because what is embraced within the patent belongs to the public and the patent itself is a grant by the public." Churchward International Steel Co. v. Carnegie S. Co. 286 Fed. at 160.

EXPLANATION OF PATENT OFFICE CITATIONS.

By B. G. Foster.

The writer of this combined felicitation and criticismand it is submitted to be a real combination in which there is a genuine interaction of ideas-has been soliciting patents for a goodly number of years, and believing that the matter may perhaps be best brought to the attention of the Examining Corps through the medium of the "Journal", hereby begs leave to burden that vehicle of information, and thereby unburden himself.

In the first place, and as leading up to the piece de resistance, it seems to put an unnecessary burden and incidently a needless expense on the applicant to cite a large number of references against a claim or a series of claims involving a single inventive idea.- The Examiner in making such citations presumably knows the disclosures therein and it cannot add a great deal to his work for him to make a selection and comply with Rule 77 "the Examiner must cite the best references at his command." The word "best" in the eyes of the applicant is an unfortunate term, but it undoubtedly means "closest of an anticipatory character," which certainly does not mean four or five or six prior patents of varying degrees of pertinence or impertinence.

The difficulty with such mass citations is that the applicant's attorney, taking up these references, usually entirely strange to him, must carefully study and scrutinize each in an endeavor to weigh it and ascertain the Examiner's point of view in order to apply it to the subjectmatter claimed. This takes time. In answer he has to give a more elaborate, time-consuming and space-occupying argument and dissertation on the distinctions than would be the case if the closest approximation alone was cited and which obviously makes the more remote approaches really of little or no consequence.

In addition thousands of these official actions mean tens of thousands unnecessary copies to be ordered, throwing not only an added drain on available patent

copies, photostats, etc., the appropriations for which are limited, but also very materially increasing the labor of "pulling", assorting, distributing and mailing them.

These objectionable features, it is believed, far outweigh the possible desirability of giving the applicant some approximation of the available prior art, and which cannot be relied upon as complete. If the Examiner deems it desirable, he may make of record additional art to that relied upon, but ordinarily the writer finds that many attorneys pay no heed to those not actually made the basis of rejections.

And this leads to the real purpose the writer has in mind, an initial explanation of the grounds of rejection. The first official action is very apt to be a sort of blanket rejection of above-noted character. It is either "the claims are rejected on Blanket-Tee and Blink-et-too, in view of Tweedledee and Tweedledum." Whereupon the attorney begins to explore the various and sundry brilliant schemes of the forerunners and see how the Examiner has managed to patch up a machine like that of his client. Quite possibly he honestly fails to get the Examiner's "slant", and restraining himself within the bounds required by Rule 22, he writes a respectful statement of his views. Very often therefore the Office and the applicants are at really cross purposes until mutual explanations by further correspondence get them in line for a final agreement or disagreement.

This, it appears to the writer, can be greatly avoided and the work expedited by a line of explanation in each office action and particularly the first, pointing out not alone the patent or combination of patents relied upon, but the particular points considered to show the invention claimed. And rules 65 and 66 certainly seem not only to authorize but require such action.

Without particularly identifying the Division, for the writer has naught but kindly feelings and respect for the entire Examining Corps, nevertheless it is a fact that there is one particular Division that he always asks a benison upon its Examiners, when he takes up an official

action therefrom-even though that action may be a complete rejection and indeed in his eyes unwarranted. And the reason is this. Never is a reference cited without a specific notation of the parts of the apparatus there disclosed which are considered to be in point. Ordinarily it requires a mere phrase as "see parts 20 and 21, Figs. 12 and 14", but it is sufficient to give the applicant a clue to, if not a fair knowledge of just what the Examiner's point of view is, and it saves the attorney and his client much time, useless discussion and correspondence, and certainly tends to more expedition of the work, both from the standpoint of the Office and applicant.

Would that each Examiner followed the example of Division-there I nearly told it. Ladies and Gentlemen of the Examining Corps, won't you try it out?

SUGGESTED CHANGES IN THE PATENT OFFICE.

By EMERSON STRINGHAM.

The memorandum which follows was prepared June 17, 1925, as an expression of personal opinion by the President of the Patent Office Society. It consists of a series of disconnected suggestions put onto paper hastily, by request. Almost each paragraph could be elaborated, but as a mere skeleton of suggestions, it seems worth passing along. The suggestions range from the rather sublimely big to the ridiculously small. Some require legislative action, others are matters of office detail.

To correct two unfortunate lines of judicial decisions statutory amendment should be obtained, establishing (1) that reissue applicants are not precluded from allowance of a claim on reissue, merely because such a claim was canceled during the prosecution of the original case:

(2) That there is no presumption that the structure disclosed in a later patent does not infringe an earlier patent.

The Patent Office should be reorganized with a commission of five or seven members at its head, having an administrative secretary to attend to details. There should be approximately one hundred examining divisions each. having a chief with four or five assistants. These divisions should be arranged into convenient groups, each group having a supervising officer. From this supervising officer all appeals and petitions would go direct to the Commission. Two or three members of the Commission would be authorized to hear and decide cases.

The period for response fixed by R. S., Sec. 4894 should be materially shortened. The preliminary report of the Secretary's Committee, dated January 30, 1925, suggested that this period be made six months. This suggestion has the important advantage of simplicity. A somewhat more complex suggestion, drafted a year and a half ago, is appended thereto.

Amended applications should be kept substantially current in office work. Cases pending three years (or even less) should be subject to final rejection, irrespective of new references or reasons.

The fee paid by applicants should bear some relationship to the amount of work done upon their applications. This was recognized in the preliminary report mentioned. Any plan to effect this purpose will be only an approximation. As one such approximation it is suggested that the final fee be based upon the maximum number of claims at any one time present during prosecution.

At least half the appeals now allowed should be abolished.

The writer believes that the applicant first to file should be treated as the prior inventor except in originality cases. It would then be practicable to allow "betriebserfidung" patents.

In interference practice it would be desirable to have some proceeding by which the testimony is taken in the presence of the tribunal of first instance, the tribunal having authority to pass upon objections. This is by analogy with equity rule 46.