Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

4 years ago I read this book and filed a patent application. Today I have an acceptance letter from the PTO in hand. You might think of that as a success story and justification of the book's premise that you can patent your own inventions. The truth is not so pretty however. What I've been granted is a "vanity patent". My examiner forced me to specify and specify so that all useful protection was gone by the time she finally acquiesced into granting the patent. So I paid a substantial amount of money and put in a herculean amount of effort into what amounts to a worthless piece of paper, which is now considered prior art against any future efforts to write a patent with real claims. The book spends 75% of its time explaining the application writing process but devotes only a few short chapters to the actual patenting process. It provides a dozen or so handy arguments to use if you are rejected on 102 or 103 grounds, which makes it sound so simple. I used every argument in the book then researched several more from the MPEP. All were rejected out of hand as "unconvincing" to the examiner. All reasonable arguments with legal precedent. This book presents a myth that the examiner is reasonable and the process straightforward as long as you have a truly novel invention. Nothing could be further from the truth. The examiner is NOT your friend and they have no obligation to be reasonable. In fact they have every incentive to be unreasonable. An abandoned application is preferable to a patent with strong protections because the latter may end up in court and a judge might decide the patent was overbroad, a risk the examiner would rather not take. An examiners performance reviews are based on how much they are able to force you to narrow the claims, and no argument is more convincing than their own long term survival at the PTO. This book contains a lot of useful information for the inventor, no doubt, and maybe when it was first written it was possible for an inventor to patent it himself. Those days are long gone. If you want a piece of paper showing your widget has been patented, go ahead and file yourself, you'll get something through. But if you actually intend to enter the commercial marketplace HIRE A PATENT ATTORNEY. You'll save yourself a several hundred bucks and years worth of fruitless effort and aggravation. Even better is to not do either, get commercial backing and let the money men hire the patent attorney.