Post Grant Review — Dispatches

Independence Day

2026-07-04T12:00:00Z

I'm used to my own failures, but this is different.

Background — part of a series documenting my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, the patent I believe copies work I disclosed first. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

250 years ago

250 years ago some folks did the hard thing, against a much stronger and more entrenched system. I'm not saying I'm in that league — but sometimes you just have to speak out when the system fails.

The patent system failed me

My disclosure, out in the open — copied and rubber-stamped “APPROVED.”

The system that was supposed to protect what I disclosed did the opposite. I published my work in the open — the way the system asks you to — and was rewarded with a thinly veiled knockoff. A hastily allowed and error-ridden examination that makes you wonder what the purpose of the patent system even is.

The knockoff patent that issued reads like a copy of mine, both literally and figuratively. The examiner had my disclosure available and granted their claims anyway. Without even proofreading those allowed claims.

When the machinery that's meant to reward inventors instead rewards whoever files a cleverly worded argument, something is broken. That's not a conspiracy; it's a failure of process. And a failed process is worth fixing, which is the whole point of this site.

The 4th

It's an interesting date for many reasons. This site has been up for a while, but I hadn't linked the domain until today. I've sent this as a draft to a few people for comment and feedback. Of note, I sent it to the USPTO and to the head of IP at Even Bigger Big Corp (remember, they bought this problem through an acquisition and didn't directly participate in any of the events of this story). In sending them the draft, I politely asked for any corrections. I believe this story is worth telling and I am trying to do it in an entertaining and engaging way. I want to make sure I have the facts correct. They have a standing invitation to send corrections wherever appropriate, and to author a post explaining the counterpoint.

Feedback welcome.

As of today, I have not heard back from either of them. I don't know that I expected to hear from them, but I offered. And it probably wasn't strategically wise of me to do that, but I want to provide an accurate description of the story. This shouldn't be a surprise to anyone. My goal is to fix the system. If it sounds like I'm being mean, that's not my intent. I'm trying to be mildly entertaining, but I've also been dealt a very bad set of cards and it feels like someone is cheating (not an accusation, a feeling). I should be free to tell my story… I'm not sure if anyone will listen.

The Declaration of Independence &
The Constitution

Independence was just the first step. The Constitution — where the founders deemed inventors' rights important enough to enumerate — didn't come for another 11 years or so.

U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 8

U.S. Constitution

Article I, Section 8, Clause 8

To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;

I think today is an apt day to reflect on how far we've fallen from the above line.

I am both an Author and an Inventor here, and I do not have the exclusive Right to my respective Writings and Discoveries. Those were so clearly taken from me. I hope you see the tragedy in this, because I sure do.

My writings were copied and passed off as someone else's. My discoveries were handed over to that same entity for barely more than a sharply wordsmithed argument.

The recipient of that patent did not hold up their end of the patent bargain.
The USPTO failed in the fundamental task of examining that patent.
But I'm on the hook to right this wrong — even though I tried to stop it.

Dispatch No. 1 — I tried to prevent this mess — where the same Clause 8 constitutional bargain (and this Constitution thumbnail) first appears.
Dispatch No. 5 — Where have I heard this before? — the déjà vu that sent me digging.
Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — the earlier, cheaper attempt to head all this off.
Dispatch No. 9 — The Overly Broad Claim Slipped Through — the overly broad claim I was trying to stop.
Dispatch No. 12 — A Private Conversation, Held in Public — the "let the other side speak in public" posture behind the standing counterpoint invite here.
Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again — the Claim 13 misrepresentation behind the error-ridden examination I point to here.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — the § 112 ground the examiner never raised, picked up in full.
Dispatch No. 26 — TL;DR; All the system failures — the "the patent system failed me" recap this dispatch reflects on.
Dispatch No. 28 — Let's Fix It — the fixes this coda closes out.

Let's Fix It

2026-06-17T12:00:00Z

Enough complaining — here's how I'd actually fix it.

Background — more thoughts on my pro se Post Grant Review series on U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies rotation-sensing I disclosed first. This one trades complaint for cure: the concrete fixes — to disclosure, fees, third-party submissions, and review — that would have caught this. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

Wishful thinking

I obviously can't go into the garage and solder up a device to fix this mess. Or portal myself into a dimension where innovation is rewarded instead of stolen.^† All I can do is offer my suggestions. It's wishful thinking on my part, but maybe someone reading this will step up and draft a law.

Not a complete solution

I don't have all the answers. But the first step in a recovery is admitting you have a problem. I hope you'll agree the system has serious systemic problems, and with that we can hopefully start the road to recovery.

† A Rick & Morty reference. ↩

What I'd change

Demand a full and thorough disclosure — § 112

Thin disclosures get the VIP door; thorough ones wait in line.

I'd beef up § 112. I'd make that a mandatory point of discussion in any examination. You'll say it already is, but show me where that was considered in this examination.

This is the fundamental patent bargain. Inventors should be held to it.

If you can't disclose the details of the invention because you don't grasp how it works (i.e. you copied it), you shouldn't get a patent.
If you don't want to disclose the details of the invention because less is more, you've weaseled out of your part of the bargain.

The disclosure is the whole purpose of the patent system. After the time window, we all get the technology. That's hard when the disclosures are crafted to disclose the absolute minimum. Society is getting the short end of that stick.

I don't know how to enforce that, or how to create a threshold bar for the thoroughness of the disclosure. § 112 is supposed to handle that, but we saw in Dispatch No. 24 how easy that is to sidestep.

This might be a place for public comment. It could be handled similarly to the third-party submission process. A member of the public could ask "hey, how does that sinusoidal-type waveform get processed into a direction change?" That'd be weird because who'd ask that? I'd have asked it sarcastically hoping the examiner would see the § 112, but someone might ask it for the sake of knowledge.

Compounding examination burden

The pile never stops growing.

If you get a patent, that's great, but the truth is as soon as the file closes, you're done. Someone wants to paint it orange? You're stuck with that static set of claims. So what everyone does is file continuations to keep the file open. That way you can go back and add claims as you find out how people are going to steal (err, work around) your technology.

This creates a compounding burden on examination. And also compounding fees, which I suppose is the point. There are 2 problems with this (actually a lot more problems, but I'll list 2):

A push for examiners to quickly process examination, which leads to the flaws I pointed out throughout this site.
A devaluing of the patent itself. After your initial disclosure the significant innovation should be out there. Subsequent continuations/divisionals aren't adding to the value of society. There are obvious exceptions, but the vast majority are prosecuted solely for maintaining the protections that the original patent should have secured.

We're in a state of quantity over quality in the US patent system, and that's not innovation. That's how we lose the global innovation race.

Give third-party submissions real weight

Read it, it's your job.

If someone goes to the trouble of putting prior art in front of the examiner, it should get more attention, not less (See Dispatch No. 4). I get not wanting the public to drag down the examination process. That's already overburdened as it is. But there needs to be a way to ensure relevant prior art is actually applied... not just "considered" (See Dispatch No. 6). I can't adequately explain my frustrations watching my third-party submission being ignored. I don't know how else to phrase it. There was so much detail in there that just never entered the record.

Let the other side speak before issuance

Some path for the silenced party to be heard (See Dispatch No. 10). That thing called a "Protest" that is totally useless in practice would be a great place to start. If there's a bad patent being prosecuted, the public should be able to flag it. Maybe raise it to a more experienced examiner? Maybe flag it for secondary review? Maybe allow the public to suggest examiners that actually understand the technology? That's probably too far, but I still don't know why there are 3 patents on the same fundamental technology examined by 3 different examiners in 3 different art units. That just seems inefficient and inconsistent.

Reward thorough examination

Incentives that make a thorough examination the default, not the exception. The RCE is great. Keep extracting those fees. If the patent is worth examining, pay for the time it takes to do a thorough job. The effort put forth in the Notice of Allowance feels (at least in my opinion) like the examiner just wanted to be done with this examination... to make that production quota. That's not fair to me, or to society in general (remember you all lose out in the long term too).

Side note: I'd suggest renaming the "Final rejection" to something more appropriate.

The PTAB and IPR

Empty pockets at the courthouse steps.

Too expensive, too damaging to the inventor. Until recently the PTAB had the well-earned moniker of the "Patent Death Squad" with an 84% rate of invalidating patents. The only thing that stopped or slowed this is a policy change under the current Director. This is a positive development for inventors, but this is too easily undone.

Let's reflect on that 84% rate of invalidating patents. That pretty much proves my point about inadequate examination.

Let's also reflect on the irony of the PTAB. Up until a year or 2 ago it was my worst nightmare — the thing that revokes patents almost as fast as the USPTO hands them out.

Now, when I want to use the PTAB and the Post Grant Review for its true and intended purpose, it is unattainable to me on a pure cost burden. That's a problem. If the examiner just did the job from the start, this would be unnecessary.

I am the perfect example of how the Post Grant Review should reinforce the system. How it should be the safety valve to protect the integrity of innovation. But, since it resolves nothing of value, it becomes a useless but incredibly expensive tool. This shows it's a cudgel and not a safety valve.

Registration instead of examination

I don't know how I feel about this option. It's been offered as an alternative. Instead of issuing patents out of the gate, you'd file your application and disclosure. Then when things get real, you'd go through the examination process. We won't admit it, but that's basically how the system works already. My story is a perfect illustration of this.

More thoughts

This isn't a complete list of solutions but I hope it will start a discussion. I am happy to include a guest post proposing other solutions. I'm even happy to include a guest post that argues the existing system is fine.

I hope to post more on the potential fixes, so feel free to let me know what you think.

Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the earlier time this idea was good enough to copy.
Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — the submission process this dispatch argues should carry real weight.
Dispatch No. 10 — Post-Allowance, Preissuance — What could I do? — the silenced-party problem the "let the other side speak" fix addresses.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — the disclosure failure behind the § 112 fix proposed here.
Dispatch No. 25 — TL;DR; §§ 101, 102, 103, and 112 — the recap of the legal grounds this closing dispatch follows.
Dispatch No. 26 — TL;DR; All the system failures — the recap of the system failures these fixes respond to.
Dispatch No. 27 — TL;DR; They were too long, so I didn't read them — the full recap this one responds to.
Dispatch No. 29 — Independence Day — the closing reflection that follows these fixes.

TL;DR; They were too long, so I didn't read them

2026-06-16T12:00:00Z

It all connects. That's the whole case — on one board.

Background — the one-screen version of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies rotation-sensing I disclosed first. This one is the whole case on a single conspiracy board; every line links to the full story if you want it. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

It's still too long, so you probably won't read it all the way through.

PGR vs. Other Issues

The last two posts parsed the PGR Grounds and the non-PGR-able failures. I'm going into both here.

There's a lot here. I feel like one of those crazy people in the movies locked in the basement with red string and a big board. It's all interconnected. You'd all believe me if I could just explain it better. Here's a condensed attempt.

Getting a patent is easy

First, know that getting a patent is way too easy. That in itself devalues the system. I don't know how to fix that, but it starts with fee incentives. The gatekeepers could better protect the system, so a change in incentives might improve that. Independent review and public comment before a patent issues may also help, but that's not how the system works.

How to steal IP

Armed with the knowledge that getting a patent is (at least sometimes) the easiest part of the whole thing, you can start by patenting the very thing you want to steal. Who cares if it's a good patent? Who cares if it actually provides any innovative steps (which is totally fair if you disclose innovative material — but that's not what happened here).^* The mere application is enough to carry weight. Why license technology? You have a patent pending on that same technology. Tell the market you're legit. Tell the original inventor to go pound sand.

* This section is deliberate satire about how the incentives can be abused — not a factual account of anyone's conduct. “Steal” and “the very thing you want to steal” are rhetorical, and “that's not what happened here” is my opinion, drawn entirely from the public record. I'm not asserting as fact that the applicant committed theft or any crime; “copying” (as I use it elsewhere) is my plain-English characterization of the side-by-side record, not a legal finding, and it isn't itself a PGR ground. ↩

The copying

I've beaten this dead horse, so I'll keep it short and just point you to where the whole copying saga lives:

Dispatch No. 2 — Why a PGR? — where I lay out what I regard as plagiarism, and why the side-by-side text makes it, in my view, plain to see — though it isn't itself a PGR ground.
Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the first time, in my view, the idea got copied, before Big Corp ever showed up.
Dispatch No. 5 — Where have I heard this before? — the literal, line-up-the-text copying, shown side by side.
Dispatch No. 8 — Back From the Dead — the copied wording (and, in my view, the underlying idea) that became the application.

If you are trying to copy an idea, don't also copy the text. It's far too conspicuous. The point here is that no one is likely to face any consequence for this. I hope you agree this is an ethical failure up and down the line.

Mislead the examiner

Words matter. You can say an awful lot and not get into trouble, provided you hedge. Take this blog for example. This is obviously satire — pointed, opinionated, and one-sided. But the satire is in my characterizations and tone; the underlying documents, dates, claim text, and quotes are real and verifiable straight from the public record. Take my opinions as opinions, but the record is the record. Am I trying to mislead or misrepresent things? I don't think so, but this is a one-sided story. If all you hear is one side of the story, your skepticism is all that dictates what's believable or not.

Unlike the examination process, I welcome public participation here. In the actual examination, though, only the applicant gets to talk. That is an easily corrupted process.

The one-sided misleading prosecution

Imagine going to court, but not being able to defend yourself. That's what it's like to watch someone else argue your technology is really theirs. Someone else copied my patent, but I couldn't even say "hey, they copied me, pay attention." In my reading of the record, the examiner wasn't paying attention, which gave the applicant a big and unfair advantage.

Here's where my take on the one-sided, misleading parts of the prosecution live:

Dispatch No. 10 — Post-Allowance, Preissuance — What could I do? — the one-sided part: I was silenced while the applicant kept arguing.
Dispatch No. 12 — A Private Conversation, Held in Public — the misleading characterizations of the record, made where I couldn't respond.
Dispatch No. 17 — Let's Ask Claude — the misleading arguments, broken down one by one.

Misrepresenting the standard

As the prosecution went on, the applicant became bolder in these assertions. Simultaneously, the examiner got weaker in objections. The clearest case of this is in the § 102 standard.

Their earlier applicant remarks set up the governing test: anticipation means "each and every element as set forth in the claim is found, either expressly or inherently described, in a single prior art reference" — that's Verdegaal, which they cite accurately… initially. That was in the first response, but not in the RCE. This is important because inherently is an operative word that they conveniently omitted in the RCE remarks.

I think this convenient omission is a tacit admission by the applicant that I do "inherently" disclose this. That's just my opinion, but hey, what do I know?

Fig. 8 — field lines through the stroke.

OK, run with me here, just believe me when I say I inherently disclose this. I say inherently because it's in a detailed figure, not verbatim text. "Inherently" is an important part of the § 102 standard so the fact that they left this off in the RCE remarks is really troubling. Is that a misrepresentation? The argument morphed into "he didn't say exactly what we said, how we said it" so I certainly think this unfairly influenced the examiner. If nothing else, it creates doubt that I actually disclosed this, which I did. Take a look at my Figure 8. This is what they say I don't explicitly state, but it's very clearly "inherently" part of this picture. It's not a stretch to say this is what the field looks like over a stroke and I'm clearly operating on the data over a stroke.

"The particular chain of sensing events" just naturally falls out of this. You can then go to my disclosure text to see exactly where this is disclosed, just not "exactly what they said, exactly how they said it." It's fundamentally the same thing, in the same order.

But the examiner should have known § 102 also includes "inherently", right? You'd hope so, but that didn't come through in the correspondence. The examiner didn't unwind the previous two § 102 admissions (first and final office actions) that I taught the very thing that was then mysteriously found as allowable. And in the same breath, conflated the § 103 objection by discussing another prior art document.

The Notice of Allowance is a mess — you should read it. Try to tell me this misleading argument about me not "explicitly" stating it had no bearing on this conclusion. Or that the examiner just lumped the § 102 and § 103 objections together.

This incredibly misleading statement has no bearing on validity, and on its own is not grounds for a PGR.

There is no penalty for this misleading statement. I am the one this harms and I had no way to prevent this.

Where this plays out in full: Dispatch No. 13 — You Still Don't Believe Me About the Direction Change Thing? — the Figure 8 that shows the “missing” element was inherently there the whole time.

Plus the § 102 and § 103 posts:

Dispatch No. 22 — § 102 — Nothing New Here — the full anticipation case, element by element, with claim 13 as the cleanest single-reference target.
Dispatch No. 23 — § 103 — Obvious to Anyone in the Field — the full obviousness case, and the ground I actually lead with in the petition.

The typos

Typos happen. The USPTO is actually really forgiving in this regard. Maybe too forgiving. It's hard to attach malice to a typo. Or I should say it's hard to prove. I don't know if these were cleverly crafted or truly innocent. The end result is the same for me. Here's an analogy: if you accidentally run someone over, you're still in trouble. If you accidentally run someone over and you flee the scene, you're in more trouble. If you run them over on purpose, then you're in big trouble. I can't be sure which it is, and I can't prove any of them.

Dispatch No. 9 — The Overly Broad Claim Slipped Through — the typo-riddled office actions, the unmarked amendments, and the overly broad claim nobody caught.
Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again — the misquoted claim text nobody on the other side caught.

Examiner inexperience?

Approved, approved, approved…

I'm not absolutely certain on this, but I did some investigation and across all of the examiner's case histories, this was the only third-party preissuance submission. If you reach a point where you have no experience, you consult the rules and realize your only responsibility is to copy the document numbers. Maybe the examiner followed the letter of the law too closely? Unlikely given the quality of the responses, so I'm inclined to think it was more incompetence. The lack of guidance on how to handle third-party preissuance submissions is a fundamental problem in the way the system was conceived.

If someone goes to the trouble of calling attention to prior art, the examiner should give it more attention, not less.

Dispatch No. 1 — I tried to prevent this mess — the preissuance submission that put the prior art in front of the examiner.
Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — what that submission actually requires: a document number in the record, and nothing more.

In fairness to the good examiners

Plenty of examiners do the job right.

I'm hard on this one examiner, but plenty of examiners do careful, honest work under real-time pressure. I would like to offer my apologies to all the good examiners who thoroughly review and examine applications. The ones that aren't a rubber stamp for approval. Even the difficult examiners. Actually… especially the difficult examiners. A difficult examination is at least a thorough examination. Why are they not all thorough examinations?

Dispatch No. 14 — My Apology to Good Examiners — the caveat that keeps this honest.

The PGR Grounds

§ 102 — Is it new?

No. That's the simple TL;DR; for this one.

I disclosed it all. Like I discussed above, it's inherently disclosed. It's almost entirely in my Figure 8. Pretty clearly at that. The rest is in my disclosure if you actually read it.

Dispatch No. 22 — § 102 — Nothing New Here — the full anticipation case, element by element, with claim 13 as the cleanest single-reference target.

§ 103 — Is it obvious?

Yes — and that's the simple TL;DR; for this one. Take known sensors, point them at a known problem, and you land right on the claim. It's obvious because this was pointed out in at least two documents (mine and the other one) and all the supposed missing pieces are common POSITA knowledge or contained in other well-known and obvious publications.

Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the earlier, pre-patent episode that first showed this idea was worth copying.
Dispatch No. 15 — Strapping Cell Phones to Oil Wells — why bolting off-the-shelf sensors onto a known problem is the definition of obvious.
Dispatch No. 23 — § 103 — Obvious to Anyone in the Field — the full obviousness case, and the ground I actually lead with in the petition.

§ 112 — Did they actually teach it?

No. That's the simple TL;DR; for this one. Woefully incomplete disclosure. I don't think they could have said any less about how it actually works.

Dispatch No. 18 — Indefinite and Unenabled — the claim terms that were never defined or taught.
Dispatch No. 19 — Bounding to a single stroke — the construction fight at the heart of the § 112 case.
Dispatch No. 20 — New material, not in the disclosure — claim language with no support in the original spec.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — the full written-description, enablement, and definiteness case.

Other things

After the damage — no fix, no penalty

The patent issued. Nobody got fired, nobody paid a fine, and there's no cheap way to undo it. Two things stand out.

Suspicious timing

The allowance landed five days before an $8B acquisition closed. I'm not claiming anything improper — just that the dates make you look twice.

Dispatch No. 11 — Suspicious Allowance Timing — the timeline, and why those dates raise an eyebrow.

No safety valve — just a $60,000 door

Once it issues, there's no in-process correction. The only door left is a roughly $60,000 PGR — and the micro-entity discount that's supposed to help the little guy is carved right out of that fee.

Dispatch No. 3 — A Man Who Is His Own Lawyer Has a Fool for a Client — pro se, micro-entity, and the fee trap that prices inventors out.

Why you should believe me

Any one of these, on its own, you could wave off. A typo. A sloppy office action. An aggressive argument. But line them all up on the board — the copying, the one-sided record, the dropped “inherently,” the typos, the timing — and the pattern is the point. That's the whole case, on one board.

Dispatch No. 25 — TL;DR; §§ 101, 102, 103, and 112 — the longer recap of the statutory grounds.
Dispatch No. 26 — TL;DR; All the system failures — the longer recap of the procedural and institutional failures.
Dispatch No. 28 — Let's Fix It — the closing dispatch, trading complaint for concrete fixes.

TL;DR; All the system failures

2026-06-15T12:00:00Z

USPTO: where ideas die (legally).

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies rotation-sensing I disclosed first. This one gathers every place the system failed me (that I know of). The copying, unread prior art, sloppy examination, misleading statements — none of which, by itself, is grounds to cancel a patent. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

This one got long too. Here are shortcuts for this page:

Not grounds for a PGR

Typos, misquoted claims, misleading arguments, so many obvious and significant failures. It's all in the paper trail. But all this means absolutely nothing.

A garbage examination can result in perfectly valid claims that would hold up to a challenge. Likewise, a thoroughly rigorous examination could result in claims that would fall apart under a significant challenge. I honestly don't know what the point of examination is aside from a light filter.

Surprisingly, none of the errors or failures below are grounds for a PGR. I have plenty of §§ 102, 103, & 112 grounds for the actual PGR. But it is important to see how all of those completely failed in this horribly mishandled examination.

This post is about the ways the system can screw up and how that has absolutely no bearing on validity. All the things that don't move the needle on my bottom line, but are worth talking about. They indicate how broken the system really is.

Remember that cartoon about no downside from the home page? This is it. No one got in trouble. None of this is "illegal" — or if it is, I'm not qualified to comment on that part.

The system has no shame

Did you know the shame nun from GoT is Rebecca from Ted Lasso?

No one got fired. No one paid a fine (well, except for me, the innocent party). As far as I can tell, nobody even got a stern talking to, or even a "shame on you." How do you keep a system honest when you reward plagiarism and punish the folks (like me) who try and call it out? I don't want to get anyone in trouble, but seriously, the system let this happen. That is how the flawed system perpetuates itself.

The result: you can be so emboldened as to copy, almost word-for-word, the exact document you are trying to rip off.^* Because it works. Because no one says this is not OK. No one says "shame!"

* To be clear, “copy” and “rip off” are my plain-English characterization of what the public, side-by-side record looks like to me — my opinion, not a legal finding or an allegation of inequitable conduct. And copying alone, as I explain throughout, isn't itself a ground for a PGR. ↩

Why discuss this here?

Only — well, you know who.

This is pretty much the only place I can publicly air these grievances. This is a story about just how many things can go wrong. Some by accident, some with more questionable intent. It's boring and nuanced. It requires a lot of thought to see how one misleading statement can lead to distraction, which caused some other misinterpretation.

Maybe someone in Congress will do something about this.

It's a lot

When I started down this investigation, I had the copying. That much was obvious. Unfortunately, the USPTO doesn't care about that. OK, Fine. But that was just the tip of the iceberg. Sloppy examination and deceptive, one-sided arguments, and more led to this situation.

And the typos. So many typos. Some seemingly innocent. The thing about a typo is it's a mistake, and the USPTO is pretty forgiving of mistakes (probably too forgiving in some cases). There are some typos here that raise some deeper questions.

No way to respond, in real time

for F@#$ sake!

I understand the burden on examination and examiners. If anyone could participate in the process, it would be an even bigger mess. But the flip side is I could have helped avoid these issues. I tried to in my third-party submission, but I couldn't force the examiner to read, understand, or apply that prior art. I was silenced — but the applicant could shift positions and mislead, and I could only watch. I had useful insight, but could not contribute. I saw the examination going off the rails due to misrepresented arguments, but could not help correct the record. Full version in Dispatch No. 10.

Sloppy examination & proofreading

Typos in the office actions, an overly broad claim that slipped through, a misquoted Claim 13 nobody caught. Full version in Dispatch No. 9 and Dispatch No. 16.

Patent quality is atrocious. AI is really good at finding these sorts of technical errors. If anyone at the USPTO wants to know more, I'd be happy to explain it. I found a trove of other technical errors like this in other examinations. I can show you how easy this is. The USPTO really should employ this to improve examination quality.

The tools are available. It's practically like spellcheck at this point.

The examiner never saw a third-party submission

Remember, I made a third-party preissuance submission — the one tool the public has. That was supposed to bring the prior art to the examiner. Nothing in the statute or MPEP, from my reading, requires this to be handled in a substantive way. The only requirement is to enter the document number into the record.

I did a quick search on this examiner's docket history and it seems mine was the only third-party preissuance submission.

This examiner never encountered another third-party preissuance submission.

Maybe the literal letter of the statute was followed. Just copy the document numbers. After all, nothing requires the examiner to actually read the prior art. Still, whether I submitted a carefully curated map of prior art or not should have no bearing. The prior art was already there and the examiner utterly failed to apply it properly. The fact that I had laid out the prior art in great detail and the examination was still so sloppy and haphazard is what is concerning. When I wonder whether something more devious was at play, this is why. If you knew someone was watching and you knew the prior art was so voluminous, wouldn't you try to do your job better, not worse?

Full version in Dispatch No. 1 and Dispatch No. 6.

"Considered," not read

A document number in the file means "considered." Not understood. Not applied. It doesn't even mean it was "read." The dispositive prior art was served up on a platter for the examiner and never substantively engaged. "Ignored" is the term I believe fits this, but "considered" could mean that too. Full version in Dispatch No. 6 and Dispatch No. 8.

Zero § 112 objections

This one is clear. The examiner raised no § 112 objections. Zero! That's a fact. You can check the record. Whether a § 112 objection was warranted or not is up for debate. You can see my deeper discussion in Dispatch No. 24 and Dispatch No. 25. The really short version is in their figures: one generic background drawing, one generic text-only block diagram, and one 3-box linear text-only flow chart (non-repeating flow). You don't need lots of figures, or even good figures (you can see my application for some pretty crappy drawings). But this screams lack of enablement.

Here are all the figures presented in this novel "invention."

Their FIG. 1 — a generic pumping-unit overview.

Their FIG. 2 — a generic sensor-system block diagram.

Their FIG. 3 — three boxes, then it just stops. No loop.

You could have a thoroughly enabled and § 112 free application with just 3 figures. But look at the ones above and tell me with a straight face this doesn't scream § 112.

At some gut level, when presented with a patent, you skip to the drawings to see what the invention is. Can you even tell from these drawings? The text disclosure is as thin as the drawings. Again, not § 112 grounds, but it's surprising the examiner didn't even question this.

The vibration sensor

“What is a vibration sensor?”

I can't blame this one on the applicant. The examiner just failed to understand this most basic concept. I had a figure. My Figure 3, for a generic 3-axis sensor. I then talk about this figure in the context of the three 3-axis sensors that I use to determine various vibrations of the system. I don't explicitly say "vibration" but that's clearly what I mean… if you apply the "inherently" standard. Really, any reasonable reading of this would get there.

An accelerometer is naturally a vibration sensor. I don't know how to be more clear about that.
A gyroscope is a vibration sensor too. I talk about the oscillation (which is a synonym for vibration) that the sensor sees as applied loads and torque changes.
I am even using the magnetometer as a vibration sensor to capture the low-frequency vibrations of the pumping system. In other words, the cyclic up/down motion that results in this poorly enabled (or not at all enabled) "sinusoid that can be monitored". Remember, I disclosed that through my Figure 8 and supporting disclosure. That's a novel use for a magnetometer.
The barometric pressure sensor — explicitly not a 3-axis sensor (the accelerometer, gyro, and magnetometer above are each 3-axis sensors), but I also show that it can determine/measure the low-frequency vibrations of the pumping motion. Also a novel use for that sensor. Have you ever heard of a barometric pressure sensor used to detect vibratory motion? Yeah, that was me. (Maybe someone else too, but if so, in a different field.)

Claim 13 got a § 102 and a § 103?

This one is mildly confusing because of yet another typo. Check out page 4 in the Final OA.

[Final OA page 4]
Claims 1-7 and 13-15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Phillips (US20190203579A1, 2019-07-04).

And

[Final OA page 12]
Claim 12-15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 103 as being unpatentable over Phillips, in view of Puwanto et al. (US 20200362686A1) herein referred to as Puwanto.

The § 102 above is probably(?) a typo, but do we know for sure?

Either way, claim 13 for sure got a § 102 in the First OA. How claim 13 still slid through so easily with both a § 102 and a § 103 is a mystery.

Claim missing allowance restrictions

This one is maddening, and should be higher on this list (I covered it previously here and here). Claim 13 simply was not proofread and so it was carelessly allowed without the examiner's stated limitations.

Analogy: Are you supposed to tell the bank they made a million-dollar mistake? You can't play dumb on this one. The allowance terms were clear. That's what gives the biggest grounds for challenging the validity, but there was no penalty for getting it wrong. They should have fessed up, but once a patent issues, it's hard to fix that. Their downside is practically non-existent, while my downside is substantial. This whole blog is proof. There's no incentive to be honest because there is no penalty for getting a broader claim than you are entitled to (and I don't think they are entitled to any of these claims, but most of all not claim 13).

The examiner should have caught this (it's basic proofreading), but the applicant should have known they got something they weren't technically entitled to. Call this a failure of the whole "honor" system.

Full version in Dispatch No. 9 and Dispatch No. 16.

Misleading the examiner

Were these innocent mistakes, or something worse? You be the judge.

Misleading standards

This one spans multiple arguments. Basically, they created an impression that § 102 was more narrow than it really is. The examiner should have known better, but then again, the examiner should have done a lot better.

In fairness, the applicant initially quoted the § 102 standard of Verdegaal Brothers v. Union Oil Co. of California, 2 USPQ2d 1051, 1053 (Fed. Cir. 1987) correctly.

Recapping: it basically says a single prior art document requires that "each and every element as set forth in the claim is found, either expressly or inherently described, in a single prior art reference" — that's Verdegaal, which they cite once accurately.

That was in the first response, but not in the RCE. This is important because inherently is an operative word that they conveniently omitted in the RCE remarks.

Why is this misleading? I sure think so. In the RCE remarks, that standard quietly became explicitly, conveniently dropping the inherently which is a huge shift.

[Applicant RCE Remarks]
there is no disclosure in Phillips of the particular chain of sensing events, including explicitly reciting the conditions for the starting and stopping events of the rotational sensing, as detailed in amended claim 1

The standard of "either expressly or inherently" is expansive — it doesn't even require a POSITA's reading. I'm fine with that standard here. But, by subsequently dropping the key inherently term, it effectively shifts the impression of the standard to appear far more restrictive than it actually is. Imagine being an easily fooled examiner. I could be wrong, but this sure seems to explain how this flimsy argument was so "persuasive."

If I didn't say exactly what they say, exactly as they say it, they should get a patent. That sounds fair to you, right? That's how innovation works in the US these days.

Sadly it worked. The examiner bought that argument.

Here's the problem: I do say exactly what they say when applying the reasonable inherently standard. Remember, they literally copied me, so I should say "they say exactly what I say." But they get the benefit of hindsight and wordsmithing. That is precisely why inherently is such a vital concept in § 102 and why I believe dropping it from the subsequent RCE remarks is so deceitful.

Forget whether I even say the things or not. My issue here is how the applicant twisted the § 102 standard in the remarks. I think that's playing dirty pool (either billiards or the other kind). What's the harm in dropping one word? Remember: No downside. No one faced any consequences, except for me.

Also, this is utterly ironic. Here's how I'd caricature the position they argued — my words, not a quote from them: "we lined up with his disclosure where it suited us… but he supposedly didn't anticipate this, because we reworded the part to sound different."

"Effectively a compass"

Sensors can do different things. To "properly" disclose that, you have to talk about all the different things. This means talking about one thing that isn't the other, and vice versa. All the applicant needs to do is find a passage that talks about the opposite and call attention to that one.

Here's an example from the applicant response to the first OA:

[Applicant remarks]
Phillips describes a sensing device that includes a magnetometer and that "[t]he magnetometer is effectively a compass that identifies a radial orientation of the sensor relative to a fixed external location such as true north." Phillips, ¶ [0022] (emphasis added).

MY Fig. 8 — field lines through the stroke.

Phillips does not appear to describe, however, that the magnetometer is used to "measure axial movement of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system based on variations in a magnet [sic] field detected by the magnetometer" as recited in claim 1.

The first statement is true, but why point it out if not to mislead the examiner? Why call attention to the use of a sensor in the other aspect if not to create a false impression of the disclosure in the examiner's mind?

The second statement is just wrong. Claude says this is a "misdirection by half-truth — suppressio veri, suggestio falsi" but I don't speak Latin, so I don't know for sure. I do know what I disclosed and here's my Figure 8 for proof. I illustrate field lines through the stroke. How can I be more clear about "measur[ing] axial movement"…"based on variations in a magnet [sic] field detected by the magnetometer" than this drawing? This is "how" you measure position. See Dispatch No. 24 — § 112.

"seemingly contradictory statements"

The one-sided, closed to the public nature of examination means the applicant can pull the "seemingly contradictory statements" out of context and create confusion in the examination. Here's an example from the applicant response to the first OA:

[Applicant remarks]
While Phillips appears to make some contradictory statements regarding movement of polished rod, at best, Phillips only appears to be capable of detecting whether the rod is moving or not. However, the configurations of Phillips do not appear to be capable of measuring axial movement with the magnetometer.

I drew a detailed picture of exactly this. Figure 8. I've harped on this a lot here. There's a lot packed into that image. Given that the applicant was clearly familiar with my document — the side-by-side record reads to me like copying; see Dispatch No. 4 — when they say this, I find it hard to square with that record.

Broadened claim language

This was in the amended claims presented to the examiner in the RCE.

This is sneaky, so stick with me here… They basically argue they're doing something narrower (fine and reasonable if you believe that), but then they change it right back to be exactly the broader thing that they are on record saying that I say. I can't make this stuff up.

Let's look back at the previous remarks to the first OA (and sorry for the repeated quote, but this is worth it):

[Applicant remarks]
While Phillips appears to make some contradictory statements regarding movement of polished rod, at best, Phillips only appears to be capable of detecting whether the rod is moving or not. However, the configurations of Phillips do not appear to be capable of measuring axial movement with the magnetometer.

They argue the prior art — Phillips, and by extension my disclosure — is only capable of detecting, not measuring. Pretty simple, "measuring" is a narrower term than "detecting." Seems reasonable, doesn't it? (ignore my Figure 8 for this)

OK, let's track this through the claim amendments in chronological order:

[Claim 1 preamble]
…
a processor subsystem to receive data from the axial motion sensor subsystem and the rotation sensor subsystem, the processor subsystem to:

Pot, meet kettle.

You see what they did here, right? They argued I don't "measure" because that term is narrower than "detecting." It's a BS argument when you simply look at my Figure 8, but they literally just copied me again in the last claim amendment despite saying they do the narrower "measuring." Just slip the broader term back in and hope no one notices… right?

This is insane — and there's no penalty for it. Even if you're on their side and believe that I didn't disclose "measure," how do you justify this? And how was it so easy for the examiner to fall for it?

Another in a long list of what I read as shady actions by the applicant and, in my opinion, an inattentive examiner who was asleep at the switch again.

New material in the claim

Comparing against a previous stroke is not disclosed anywhere in their application.

Let's look at the RCE, page 5:

[Their Arguments/Remarks from the RCE]
Further, while Phillips discussed some comparison of values, Phillips does not disclose using the value detected during a previous stroke to determine if rotation of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system has occurred. [Their emphasis, not mine]

No one is looking.

Did they even disclose this?

No! It's not even in their written specification. They say stuff like "during an entire stroke" and "during the stroke" (which I state 20 times in various contexts in my disclosure). But in their disclosure, no "previous," no equivalent term. There's a "baseline," but that refers to vibration, not a discrete stroke. There's no illustrative drawing you can point to. Nothing.

But I made a drawing for this very concept in my application.

My Fig. 6 — my rotation/stroke state looping logic.

But there is a very good argument that I disclose exactly this. See my Figure 6. The system could run continuously, but since it's a battery-powered device, you want to put it to sleep. In addition to Figure 6, I discuss this in my [0089], [00131], [00152] paragraphs.

I disclosed it, but they didn't, and it got snuck in the claim without identifying it as new material. This is a two-for-one. A claim date issue, and a clear § 112. Yet another examiner failure coupled with sneaky (in my opinion) amendments. If you know the examiner isn't paying attention, why not try to push the envelope? No downside, remember?

Full version in Dispatch No. 20.

Amendments without proper markup

Minor? I have bigger issues with the vibration sensor as portrayed by the examiner. But on the applicant's side, they deleted the vibration sensor from claim 13 and added it to claim 1 without the appropriate markup. That's an important nuance to the Notice of Allowance showing how little scrutiny was given to this application.

The line in question is:

a vibration sensor subsystem for monitoring vibration of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system in three axes; and

It's not in the Original claim 1 or 13.
It appears in the First Amended Claims with no markup in claim 1, but with markup in claim 13.
Then it was removed (with markup) from claim 13 and left with no markup in claim 1 in the RCE Amended Claims.

I have a couple issues with this. The lack of markup in claim 1 is an obvious problem. Removing it from claim 13, effectively broadening it, especially right when the examiner was supposedly reviewing that very claim, is a different problem. Plus it's absent from the other independent claims which raises the larger question of examination proofreading across all claims. I think I've made a pretty compelling case that the claims were not adequately reviewed against the allowable material. I wonder if they were read at all.

You can follow the claim adds and deletes here:

Mismatched terms in claims vs. arguments

We've already established this examination didn't pay close attention to details. Here's another example:

The granted claim (Amended Claim 1) says: "after the direction change… has been detected, begin to determine rotation."
The applicant's RCE remarks say: "rotation sensing only occurs once a direction change is sensed."

Which is it? And if it truly is after, isn't that exactly what I already disclosed by "over the course of a stroke" i.e. looking back, after, and parsing out the stroke like we've done since at least 1967, and likely long before that? If you could do it once a direction change is sensed, that would at least be interesting, but still not enabled in the disclosure. By the way, to do this in a real-time/immediate approach like they describe involves a lot of modeling and predictive algorithms. That's totally unenabled and totally unacknowledged in their disclosure.

Misrepresented claim text

This "typo" is squarely on the applicant.

The text of a claim 13 quotation in the RCE remarks is not the text in the amended claim 13.

This one is hard to spot. Here it is on the first page of the RCE remarks:

In particular, Phillips does not describe the sensor system of amended claim 13 including a processor subsystem to:

Is it just an innocent typo? I don't think so, especially since it made claim 13 appear to have the same limitations as claim 1.^†

† That's my opinion about a discrepancy in the public record, not a finding — I can't see intent. I'm not alleging, and the PGR does not allege, inequitable conduct or any breach of the duty of candor. My point is narrower: the claim text quoted in the remarks doesn't match the amended claim, and that mismatch lines up with the examiner's confusion. ↩

Look at page 1 of the RCE remarks. That says claim 13, right? But the text is claim 1. If that is an innocent typo, it certainly explains why the examiner thought they all contained the same text:

[Notice of Allowance]
Claim 13, 16 and 19 include analogous, though not necessarily coextensive, features in conjunction with Claim 1, an [sic] is, therefore, along with its dependencies, for similar rationale as disclosed above, allowed.

This one is a much bigger deal than I'm making it out to be. You can draw a straight line from this "innocent" typo straight to the bamboozled Notice of Allowance. The examiner should have caught this, but it sure seemed like claim 1 and 13 had similar text… if you rely on the applicant remarks too heavily (and don't proofread the amended claims), that is.

Other things

Suspicious timing

The allowance landed five days before an $8B acquisition closed. No evidence of anything improper — just dates that make you wonder. Full version in Dispatch No. 11.

I think something shady happened, the timing is too coincidental given all of the other failures. But I can't prove it, so I'll just leave it at that.

No safety valve — just an expensive PGR

The only door left, and it isn't cheap.

There are zero in-process corrections. The only door left is a roughly $60,000 PGR, after the damage is done. Full version in Dispatch No. 24.

Hopefully someone reading this will propose a fix. Ultimately, only Congress can truly fix this. This is actually a bipartisan issue. There aren't many of those these days. It's also an easy thing to understand. They always ask if you have a patent on Shark Tank. All you need to know is it's important and the system is broken. We're (Congress) going to fix it for folks like you out there with great ideas.

What happens to badly examined patents?

Fixing a badly examined patent is painful and expensive. Even when you catch it early enough for a PGR. The problem is an issued patent has an assumption of validity. As best I can tell, if an examiner just allows a patent without examination, that is as valid as one that has been through the wringer (i.e. careful examination and thoughtful restrictions… which hopefully are proofread).

Here's a hypothetical question. I haven't found the answer, but it comes from those settlement press releases^‡ that were in the news recently: What happened to those patents examined with the conflict of interest? If I dig further, I might be able to find the answer, but on the surface, my best guess is nothing. From what I can tell, flawed, incompetent, or even corrupt examination doesn't have a safety valve. Again, this is all my opinion and I'd happily issue a correction, but it doesn't seem there is a penalty for any of this. There is no safety valve and Congress really needs to fix this. Bad patents are a scourge, devaluing true innovation and good patents.

‡ A USPTO employee agreed to pay $500,000 to resolve a conflict of interest; a former employee agreed to pay $122,480 over another. ↩

Bottom line

Any one of these failures is a problem. Stacked together, they're how a published application becomes someone else's patent — and why I'm calling attention to all of this.

Dispatch No. 1 — I tried to prevent this mess — the ignored preissuance fee.
Dispatch No. 2 — Why a PGR? — where the § 112 gaps were first flagged.
Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the earlier time this same idea was good enough to copy.
Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — the submission that was "considered," not read.
Dispatch No. 8 — Back From the Dead — how the rejected application became a patent.
Dispatch No. 9 — The Overly Broad Claim Slipped Through — the claim that should never have issued.
Dispatch No. 10 — Post-Allowance, Preissuance — What could I do? — being silenced during examination.
Dispatch No. 11 — Suspicious Allowance Timing — the timing around the allowance.
Dispatch No. 12 — A Private Conversation, Held in Public — the misleading characterizations of the record.
Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again — the misquoted claim nobody caught.
Dispatch No. 20 — New material, not in the disclosure — the claim limitation that isn't in their own disclosure.
Dispatch No. 22 — § 102 — Nothing New Here — the anticipation ground behind the "misleading § 102 standard" and "new material" sections here.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — the ground only the PGR could reach.
Dispatch No. 25 — TL;DR; §§ 101, 102, 103, and 112 — the companion recap of the legal grounds.
Dispatch No. 27 — TL;DR; They were too long, so I didn't read them — the even-shorter recap, for when this one ran long too.
Dispatch No. 28 — Let's Fix It — the closing dispatch, turning these system failures into concrete fixes.
Dispatch No. 29 — Independence Day — the closing reflection on this same "the system failed me" record.

TL;DR; §§ 101, 102, 103, and 112

2026-06-14T12:00:00Z

§ 101, 102, 103, 112 — the four sections in one place, finally made peace with.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies rotation-sensing I disclosed first. This one is the one-page recap of the four sections — § 101, § 102, § 103, and § 112 — the meat of the PGR. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

This is exhausting

I'm an inventor, I shouldn't be explaining the significance of terms like "expressly" or "inherently" or legal theory. I'm wholly unqualified for that. Plus, I have better things to do, and hopefully you do too. Here's the recap.

Also, for anyone who got through all the other posts, if I ever meet you in person, let me know and I'll buy you an adult beverage… or a beverage of your choice.^†

† Terms: only good for one, subject to change without notification. But either way, thanks for taking the time to read them. ↩

§ 101 — Is it even an invention?

§ 101 — A bare sine wave with a sensor strapped on "shouldn't" get past the gate.

§ 101 isn't a big win for me here, and I'm not pressing it as a ground in the PGR — it's a discussion, not a door I'm knocking on. My real issue with this application is in how they phrase it as the magnetic field makes a sine wave, and the linear motion is a sine wave, so that's the invention. The real argument falls under the other sections; if you did look at it through a strict § 101 lens, you could frame it as a bare correlation dressed up as an invention — but that's a framing I'm raising for discussion, not a conclusion I'm asking anyone to rule on. Feel free to argue otherwise. I'm open to corrections. Mostly I'm just sad the examiner didn't even take a look — there was good reason to — so chalk it up as one more thing examination never reached. It stays commentary; the real grounds are §§ 102, 103, and 112.

Full version in Dispatch No. 21.

§ 102 — Is it new?

§ 102 — one reference already shows every element (actually two references, each by itself). Nothing new here.

Each of two references — my own publication and Fyfe — anticipates on its own; expressly and inherently. Inherently is the operative word and if you read the full post, you'll see the shenanigans the applicant pulled by conveniently omitting this key term during the correspondence. This, combined with all the other shenanigans, deserves another TL;DR; post. Stay tuned for that one.

§ 102 was the key objection from the examiner, and it's a good one. It strongly applies here. It's baffling how the examiner rolled over on this one. In the petition it rides in the alternative, though — § 103 leads, because my § 102 read of claims 1–12 depends on the Board adopting the patentee's stroke construction, and § 103 holds either way. (Claim 13's § 102 is the exception — no “direction change” language to construe — so it's the cleanest anticipation shot.)

I'll paraphrase their argument here. It goes sort of like this: I don't say the thing exactly how they say it. They say their novel step is to detect rotation only during a stroke which is defined by 3 direction reversals. Again, feel free to correct me or help clarify things. This is the recap, so I've condensed it considerably.

§ 102 says anticipation means a single prior art document has to disclose every element of the claim, arranged the way the claim arranges them. (The legal phrase is "arranged as in the claim," not "listed in the same order" — a subtle but real distinction.) I think my paraphrasing lays out the elements, arranged just that way.

My paragraph [0082] is important. I say "An accelerometer can be used to detect the accelerations imparted by the directional reversals caused by stroking action." I also talk about the magnetometer in this same paragraph "The magnetometer experiences a range of field distortions as the sensor moves closer and further from steel objects in the pumping system. Short term variation in the magnetometer readings can therefore also be indicative of stroking action."

The examiner didn't cite [0082]. But [0029] was cited repeatedly by the examiner. Here's what [0029] says: "In this instance, the accelerometer and gyroscope are configured to determine immediate rotational deflection of the bridle assembly during the course of a single stroke by way of an inertial reference."

If you forget about [0082] (or never read it), [0029] states it implicitly — here I "detect rotation only during a stroke," so from there all you need is to know what a stroke is. I'd call that "obvious" but that goes to § 103. For the § 102, you just need to look at my paragraph [0082] where that is stated explicitly.

Fig. 8 — field lines through the stroke.

And if you still don't believe any of this, look at my Figure 8. A picture is worth a thousand words. This one should at least be worth a few dozen. Look at the field lines I drew relative to the linear positions. This is the how. This is missing from their disclosure, and that goes to § 112. But in the strict § 102 sense, this inherently captures the stroke. You can see it right here. All you need for § 102 is my paragraph [0029] which calls out the rotation sensing bound to a stroke, and either [0082] or Figure 8 (but I provided both!) to get that the stroke is parsable by the magnetometer. These are all the elements, arranged as the claim arranges them — one reference, no combining. It's simple enough to follow without specialized training, though the petition still supports every ground, this one included, with the expert declaration. This is textbook § 102.

Full version in Dispatch No. 22.

§ 103 — Is it obvious?

§ 103 — if the whole “invention” is just “lift your foot,” it was obvious.

§ 103 is broader. If you believe the argument that I didn't say everything exactly like they said it (and if you fall for the argument that I did not explicitly recite the conditions for the starting and stopping events, which is not the bar for a § 102) — then § 103 asks whether this is obvious. That's an easy ask. If you have a thing that goes up and down, is that motion naturally defined by 3 direction changes? Stated like that it's probably closer to a § 101, but in § 103 you can ask that of a POSITA. By now you're probably a POSITA and should be able to answer that basic question. To me the answer is plainly yes — and in the petition I don't just assert that, I give the reason a skilled person would combine these, supported by the expert declaration (obviousness needs articulated reasoning, not just "of course"). Now you only need my paragraph [0029] that says I bound that sensing to the single stroke.

§ 103 lets you combine those as obvious. Why? Because they are obvious. I already disclosed it and any supposed missing piece does not require a leap to get there.

In fairness, the Final OA added a § 103 for some of the claims. That office action was a mess of typos, so (in my opinion) an internal review should be performed, just for the sake of integrity. But that's not how this system works.

The real § 103 should have been Fyfe, on all claims. § 102 works there too, but if you want to say the elements aren't arranged exactly as the claim arranges them, or they used the term alternative embodiment, § 103 works perfectly here. That's before you bring in other references which is also fair game in § 103.

And the examiner already had Hurst — he used it during prosecution to reject the tubing-rotator claims. I even talk about Hurst in my own disclosure, so the motivation to combine was sitting right there in front of everyone. To be clear, Hurst isn't a ground I'm raising in the petition: the examiner already considered it, so building a fresh § 103 on Hurst would just draw a § 325(d) “we already looked at that” denial. I flag it here for what it shows — how well-known this all already was.

I didn't catch this one when I wrote up the § 103 post.

From the applicant RCE:

[Their RCE Arguments, in the § 103 section, referring to the § 102 section]
Claims 8 and 9 depend from claim 1 and are allowable for at least some of the reasons discussed above. Hurst does not remedy the deficiencies of Phillips noted above.

I just reread Hurst and there are some interesting lines that underscore how obvious this already was (note: this didn't make it into the § 103 post).

[Hurst [0007]]
With each stroke of the pumping unit, the rotator may rotate the rods a fraction of one revolution.

OK, so it's obvious that the rotation occurs during a stroke. So you'd want to sense this during a stroke. This was in the background section. Plain and obvious and again, even if you still believe I don't state everything, here's the combination.

And this. Here's another definition of the stroke. Another way to write it, but meaning the exact same thing as the direction change nonsense. For the record, this is a much more common and traditional way to describe the stroke. We further split the stroke into its up and down phases because interesting things happen on each of those. What happens between up and down? Yeah, a direction change. It's right here.

[Hurst [0018]]
wherein the motion of the pump plunger 110 comprises an “upstroke” and a “downstroke,” jointly referred to as a “stroke.”

In short § 103 has a lot of ammunition, but only if you don't believe I disclose everything "expressly" or "inherently". I think § 102 was much stronger, but the lack of § 103 pushback from the examiner on the key claims is troubling.

Full version in Dispatch No. 23.

§ 112 — Did they actually teach it?

§ 112 — passing off a stick-figure sketch as a real teaching of how.

§ 112 is the one ground I could only raise here, in the PGR — the preissuance submission couldn't touch it (it's limited to prior art), and an IPR can't reach it either. This should have been questioned during examination, but hey, we're here because of a failure in examination.

And it's the cleanest of the four. §§ 102 and 103 are a fight about my disclosure and the prior art — § 112 isn't. It's judged entirely on their own four corners: it doesn't matter what I disclosed or what any reference says, only whether their spec teaches what their claim covers. There's no prior-art fight to have, because the hole is inside their own document. That's why, of the four, it's the one I'd bank on.

§ 112 in simple terms asks if the disclosure actually discloses the things they claim — and, separately, whether the claim is even clear enough to know what's covered (that's the definiteness piece). You should go read it. Actually, go read both, here's the link: "thin joints of steel bar that are threadedly connected through couplings".

The first thing you should notice is there are only 3 figures, one of which is just an overview/background. Another is a generic block diagram of a sensor system (obvious on its face). The third figure is a 3-step flow chart. No indication this is a repeating process, which is a critical flaw. You might say that's obvious, but if you say the sensing "ceases," that's all it says — nothing in their disclosure tells a reader it then repeats.

I happen to think this is a very complex and nuanced problem to solve. That's why my disclosure is easily 3x the length of theirs. Length has no bearing on quality or whether things were disclosed or not, but it's a big clue. One that helps frame this as a § 112. Did they actually disclose what they claim? I think the answer is clearly no.

First and obvious is the added material about the "previous stroke" that appeared in the Amended Claims after the final. You can read their disclosure, search for any notion of a "previous stroke". Not disclosed, a clear § 112… but you have to pay attention. The applicant remarks sure make it sound like it's in there, doesn't it?

How you turn a magnetometer sine wave into a direction change is also not disclosed. That is a bare correlation without enablement.

You can only confirm a direction change after it happens — but the claim acts "once" it occurs. How you close that timing gap is never disclosed. That's a big, unenabled problem.

Full version in Dispatch No. 24.

Bottom line

Three doors that actually sink the claim — §§ 102, 103, and 112 — any one of them does it (with § 101 along for the discussion). And § 112 is the one I could only get to through the PGR, and it's a big one. And honestly, the one that offends me the most. A workaround would have been fine, but this is a poorly disclosed hack. It doesn't even rise to a workaround.

Dispatch No. 21 — § 101 — What Even Counts as an Invention — the full § 101 eligibility discussion.
Dispatch No. 22 — § 102 — Nothing New Here — the full § 102 anticipation case.
Dispatch No. 23 — § 103 — Obvious to Anyone in the Field — the full § 103 obviousness case.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — the full § 112 written-description / enablement / definiteness case.
Dispatch No. 26 — TL;DR; All the system failures — the companion recap, covering the system failures instead of the legal grounds.
Dispatch No. 27 — TL;DR; They were too long, so I didn't read them — the even-shorter recap, for when this one ran long too.
Dispatch No. 28 — Let's Fix It — the closing dispatch, trading this recap's complaints for concrete fixes.

§ 112 — They Never Said How

2026-06-13T12:00:00Z

§ 112 — passing off a stick-figure sketch as a real teaching of how.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review series on U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies rotation-sensing I disclosed first, and the cleanest ground I have. This one says the patent flunks the basic bargain — it never actually teaches how to detect a direction change from the sensor signal. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

§ 112 — The patent deal

Every other section in this series asks whether the claim is any good: is it eligible (§ 101), is it new (§ 102), is it non-obvious (§ 103). § 112 asks a different and, to me, more fundamental question — did they actually teach anyone anything? That's the whole deal. The Constitution (via Congress) lets the public hand me (the inventor) a temporary monopoly, but only in exchange for a real disclosure. That’s the deal. That’s the fair trade.

I get to make money for a limited time because I told you how it works, how to make my invention. And then, after that limited time, you all get to make my invention. Sounds great, right? (I haven’t seen a dime, for the record)

You all are supposed to benefit from inventors disclosing their inventions. That’s the theory at least…

What happens when the inventor doesn’t hold up their end of the deal?

The inventor has to describe what was invented, enable a skilled person to actually build and use it across everything claimed, and draw the claim clearly enough that the public knows what's fenced off. At the end of the patent term, you (the public) get that technology. So what if the disclosure is so vague and useless that no one can make or understand the invention? Well, if you hand out a bunch of patents to folks who don't actually disclose their "invention" we (society) have given them something for nothing. That is a problem. The patent office is supposed to be the gatekeeper, but they failed us all here.

Here's one of the many tragedies: the public good was not progressed by this garbage patent. Nothing was taught. Nothing was given in exchange for that monopoly. I got screwed now (because they got a piece of my supposed monopoly), but you all get screwed forever.

No § 112 Objections?

This should bother you as much as it does me: the examiner raised zero § 112 objections. Not one. I flagged that all the way back in Dispatch No. 2 — the application is chock-full of § 112 problems and not a single one was ever put to the applicant. An examiner not raising a single § 112 issue doesn't prove a lack of skill in the art — but in my reading of this record, it's hard to read it any other way. Either way, the § 112 problems went unexamined, and that's a problem in itself.

I had no way to raise it either — the only public tool the system provides before a patent issues structurally can't touch § 112. I'll get into exactly how that trap is built below. For now, the point is that everything that follows is being said here, in a PGR, for the first time — at the only moment the system allows.

An analogy

Sure, it's a time machine — I just never told you how to build one.

I invented a time machine. Forget the §§ 101, 102, and 103 issues here, just run with me for a bit. Forget if your time machine even technically works (that should matter, but it really doesn't).

Here's my disclosure: It's got a flux capacitor with a lot of blinky lights. You go to 88 miles per hour and you end up in 1955, or 1985, or 2015, or I guess 2045. That's it. That's my disclosure. Did I give you enough to go make your own time machine at the end of my patent term? If I did, cool, I should get a patent. If not, it should get kicked back on a § 112.

Thin, vague disclosures are becoming a real problem for innovation. This application is a great example of this problem. Go ahead and read it. The whole point of Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 is to move knowledge and understanding. When you allow, and reward, carefully worded applications that don't fundamentally invent anything — that don't teach anything — you've undermined the entire system. Everyone should care about this problem. We're giving away something for nothing. It's worse for me, but it's bad for society too.

The defect in their enablement, or lack thereof

The entire invention revolves around detecting a “change of direction” from a magnetometer that produces a wiggling, sinusoid-ish signal. Their spec asserts that this signal “can be monitored to determine” when the rod changes direction — and then the disclosure stops. That's it. It recites the result and skips the how. But that magnetic field environment is a mess: there's moving steel all through the system, the field drifts in direction and magnitude along the whole stroke, and their spec never teaches how to tell the sensor's own motion apart from every other metal thing moving nearby. Saying the signal “can be monitored to determine” a direction change, with no teaching of how you pull that needle out of that haystack, is not a disclosure. It's a wish. That's the textbook enablement failure: claiming a result — the signal “can be monitored to determine” a direction change — while leaving a skilled person to undue experimentation to actually get there. That's the Wands standard (In re Wands), and it's a more basic problem than the broad “full scope” failure in Amgen: you never even reach scope when the how was never taught at all. I walked through exactly why that's so hard in Dispatch No. 13, and I drew the picture (my Figure 8) that they didn't. Did you see their figures? They are also thin, unenabled garbage.

Three figures that reveal the problem

The figures don’t cause the § 112 problem — they reveal it. What you see when you look at them makes the thin disclosure obvious. Part of the § 112 disclosure obligation is that you need figures where they’re necessary to understand the invention. OK, they provide 3. Could you disclose this invention with only 3 figures? Maybe, but not with these 3 figures. This is easy. Let’s go through them.

Original figures

Figure 1 — an overview — Definiteness

Their FIG. 1 — a generic pumping-unit overview.

They didn’t copy this from me, but I’d be shocked if it wasn’t lifted from someone else. This is just a generic overview. A typical pumping unit. You can see the counterweights at… uhhh… well, they didn’t label them. It’s the hatchet-shaped thing between 110 and 170. That’s a big ol’ chunk of steel that, relative to the sensor, changes direction. Technically it’s rotating so that means it’s always changing direction, but I’m not splitting hairs. In this illustrated position they are closest to the sensor and at some point they are farthest from the sensor. The magnetometer sees that.

The point is that the counterweights are at least something that changes direction (parsable from the magnetic field readings), but do we know if that’s what they are referring to? It’s unclear. That counterweight is closely related to the stroke, but the ambiguity renders the disclosure indefinite. Exactly what is changing direction and how do you enable determination of that? No answer can be found in the disclosure. § 112.

Figure 2 — a block diagram — Enablement

Their FIG. 2 — a generic sensor-system block diagram.

I have one of these. They didn’t copy it (at least not verbatim like the other copying). This figure really adds nothing to the enablement. I at least go to the trouble of showing the types of sensors and how they fit in the larger system. Their Figure 2 component/subsystem is about as generic as you could possibly get. These subsystems exist in a larger block, but how are they connected? What is the data flow? What do they contain?

I don’t necessarily have a problem with this figure. I have a problem with it being the only substantive illustration of the actual thing… it doesn’t enable anything. It's as vague as the text that describes it.

This should have been a § 112. Not this image alone, but that this was the only image.

Figure 3 — a linear flow chart — Enablement

Their FIG. 3 — three boxes, then it just stops. No loop.

Remember how this process repeats. I’ll readily say you don’t have to do it every stroke. The whole point of my disclosure is that you could defer sensing to optimize battery life. But you need to repeat this periodically. Any period. Once a day? Once an hour? Once every Nth stroke?

No, this 3-box flow chart terminates with no loop-back and no repeat trigger — the disclosure teaches a single execution and stops. A flow chart can be called repeatedly, of course, but that repetition has to come from somewhere: a caller, a scheduler, a loop in the spec, a described trigger. None of that is here. A skilled person reading this disclosure is left to supply the repetition themselves, which is exactly the undue experimentation the enablement requirement prohibits. There’s a repetition that is not illustrated. Enablement failure — § 112.

Lack of figures ≠ § 112

The figures aren't the failure — they're just the tell. You can pretty much see my § 112 issues with this application in just the figures alone. I’m not expecting a lot, but just look at them. Doesn’t this scream § 112? Not exactly, but it should raise the concern.

To be clear, the lack of figures does not trigger § 112, but the alarm bells should have sounded during examination. The actual textual disclosure is as thin as these figures. That’s a problem.

The timing problem — you can only know after — Enablement

Eyes closed on the coaster — you can only feel a change after it happened.

Still on enablement — here’s the timing problem that makes the missing “how” even sharper. And all of this starting and stopping detection is supposed to happen in real time. Remember, they start and cease sampling of rotation at exactly a change in direction (presumably a vertical direction, but not crystal clear). Analogy: Go on a rollercoaster and close your eyes. When do you know you changed direction (vertical direction, i.e. peaks and valleys)? That’s right… after you actually changed direction. You can’t tell the rise or fall until you’re already into the rise or fall. A flat spot and a peak "feel exactly the same" at that moment. The magnetometer sensing is slightly different, but the delay to a positive detection is real.

To sense the change in direction properly, you need to watch the signal past the thing you’re looking for. Only after it really changes direction can you clearly see whatever it is that you see in that sine wave they briefly and cryptically mention (that’s the first part that wasn’t disclosed). That’s the problem with inertial sensors and why it’s so important to have someone who understands how those sensors work do the examination. They don’t magically (directly) sense the thing this application claims to sense. Clearly the examiner didn’t comprehend that here.

In the rollercoaster analogy, you might transition to a flat section of track, but not at a "global" peak. From an instantaneous perspective, they are exactly the same. They feel the same. This is a simple physics exercise. To determine a direction change, you need to look back at least one sample but probably many more to reduce false positives. That necessarily means you’ve sampled before and after the direction change. Even if it’s just one sample (but with a noisy signal, it is many more to avoid false positives). Their disclosure never teaches how to square that unavoidable delay with acting the instant the change occurs — and that missing how is the § 112 problem.

It gets even worse when it comes to their prosecution record, and I’ll explain this below. In short, important operable terms were switched in the arguments and in the claims. It’s subtle. Another in the long list of questionable actions.

If you are going to carve out something so specific — the particular chain of sensing events — you need to show how that actually works, otherwise it’s a textbook § 112! I still argue that I thoroughly disclose bounding the sensing to a single stroke, and that is well known to be defined by the direction changes (or any of the 100 other ways to phrase that). My disclosure anticipates their claim on this point under § 102. But we can still pick apart the claim in § 112.

More enablement — the "once"/"after" bait-and-switch

I talk about the physics realities of sensing above. This is where the reality comes crashing into the prosecution record through a staggering bait and switch on some key terms.

RCE Amended Claims

[Amended Claim 1]
sensing a direction change in the at least one component of the downhole pumping system to determine when a stroke of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system has been completed and to determine that a new stroke is beginning: and

after the direction change in the at least one component of the downhole pumping system has been detected, begin to determine rotation

After!!! "after the direction change"!!! — that's not what they say in the arguments. Now let me be fair: "after" is plenty definite — it just means "any time once you've detected the change" — and a merely broad term isn't an indefinite one. But that breadth is the tell on a different front. Immediately after? A few samples after? A week after? That's an enormous range, and the disclosure never teaches you how to operate across any of it. So the defect isn't really that "after" is fuzzy — it's the same enablement / written-description hole: an open-ended result with no how behind it.

The remarks could clarify “after,” and prosecution history is allowed to supply the very reasonable certainty § 112(b) asks for — Nautilus itself measures definiteness against the claims read in light of both the specification and the prosecution history. Read the prosecution history. It's not there either. Maybe it would have been if the examiner thought to raise it, but the world will never know.

Here's what they say in the applicant RCE remarks:

[RCE Remarks]
First, there is no disclosure in Phillips that rotation sensing only occurs once a direction change is sensed, indicating that a new stroke is beginning.

Second, there is no disclosure in Phillips that the sensing then continues during a second change in direction.

Finally, there is no disclosure in Phillips of then ceasing the sensing once a third change in direction is detected.

"Once" (what they argued) and "after" (what they actually claimed). These terms do not mean the same thing — they sold the examiner a tight, gated "once" and walked away with a loose, open-ended "after" the disclosure never supports. The claim they got is broader than the invention they pitched. And for the record, I hate arguing over such a pedantic term. It's clear that this was disclosed by me years ago (§ 102). Even if you take the strict interpretation of "it has to be said exactly like this", it's obvious what this means when read by anyone who halfway understands science (§ 103).

There are ways to do this direction change sensing in a predictive approach, but that was nowhere near disclosed, let alone acknowledged as a concern or possibility. The end result was claimed with no "how to get there." That's a fundamental § 112!

The full indefiniteness and enablement is in Dispatch No. 18: which “direction” even is it — the rod's linear reversal at the top and bottom of a stroke, or its rotational orientation? Nothing in the claim, or in how it was read to the examiner, tells a skilled reader which. That's the bind I press there: definite-and-anticipated, or novel-and-unintelligible — and to my mind they shouldn't get it both ways.
The written-description / new-matter piece is Dispatch No. 20: their claim recites comparing against a “previous stroke,” but their own specification never describes that. You can't claim what your disclosure doesn't support.

Further below I'll cover two things those dispatches don't address: why § 112 is the interesting and clean ground, and why — maddeningly — it's the one defect I had no way to raise before the patent issued.

"Stroke" does double duty — a second definiteness problem

Definiteness again — § 112(b) — and this one comes straight out of their own text.

[Their disclosure]
[0047] … A reduced velocity of the rod rotator 180 may indicate an improper installation of the rod rotator 180, where a full stroke of the rotation mechanism of the rod rotator 180 may not be adequately occurring because of the installation orientation.

OK, so now there is ambiguity between the stroke of the pumping unit and the stroke of the rotator ratchet arm — the word “stroke” doing double duty for two different motions. That's a second, self-contained § 112(b) indefiniteness problem, sitting entirely within their own four corners, and it stacks right on top of the “which direction” ambiguity from Dispatch No. 18: a skilled reader can't say with reasonable certainty which “stroke” the claim even means.

The processor with no recipe — Definiteness, § 112(f)

This argument is aimed squarely at the processor — specifically claim 13's processor functions — not the sensor subsystem, and here's why. You could try the same move on the “sensor subsystem,” but it's a weaker target — “sensor” at least connotes a known class of physical thing (a magnetometer, a gyro), and their Figure 2 draws those subsystems as labeled boxes a patent owner will wave around as “structure.” Fine. But that very same Figure 2 shows the processor as a single box labeled “Processor 212” — and a box that just says processor is the textbook example of not an algorithm. So the processor leg survives the one figure they'd point to; the sensor leg I'll leave on the table.

Definiteness — § 112(b) via § 112(f). This one is specific to claim 13. Look at how that claim is actually built — claim 13's three processor functions:

verify the axial movement;
detect the rotational values during a current stroke; and
compare this stroke's rotational values against a previous stroke's to determine if rotation has occurred.

A “subsystem” with nothing but a naked function bolted onto it is the classic nonce-word setup — the “black box to do the thing” drafting that Williamson v. Citrix (Fed. Cir. 2015, en banc) says gets treated as means-plus-function under § 112(f) whether or not they wrote the magic word “means.” And once you're in § 112(f), the rules tighten: the claim reaches only the structure the spec actually discloses for that function — and for anything a processor does, the Federal Circuit demands a disclosed algorithm, an actual step-by-step recipe, not just “a processor, which does it” (Aristocrat, WMS Gaming). So go look for their algorithm. It's not disclosed.

The cleanest gap is the "compare" function: how does the processor take this stroke's rotational values, find a “previous stroke,” compare the two, and decide whether rotation “has occurred”? What are the steps? There aren't any — the spec recites the result, names a processor, and stops. No algorithm means no corresponding structure, and no corresponding structure means the claim is indefinite under § 112(b) — a second, independent road to the same place, and one that (like everything else in this post) needs nothing but their own four corners to walk. And note what this doesn't lean on: it never reaches claim 1's sensors, and it doesn't ride on the “direction change” fight at all — claim 13 doesn't even use that term.

And to be clear about scope: claim 13 is the only claim where this no-algorithm angle lives — but the rest of the § 112 case isn't a claim-13 story at all. The missing “how” (enablement), and the “which direction?” and double-duty “stroke” ambiguities (definiteness), hit the other three independent claims right alongside it — claim 1, claim 16 (the tubing-rotator version), and claim 19 (the method version) — not just claim 13. § 112 isn't a one-claim problem here; it's spread across the whole patent.

The vibration sensor in three axes

I know, the vibration sensor again. Remember, I drew a diagram that I used for describing a magnetometer, an accelerometer, or a gyro in three axes, Figure 3. This was a point the examiner found novel (I still disagree because of the whole "an accelerometer is a vibration sensor" thing). But why use a 3-axis sensor at all? That's a fair question to ask in a § 112 context.

I probably could have done a better job explaining that myself, but here are two relevant passages:

[My disclosure [0081]]
[0081] … After calibration, a three-axis magnetometer can determine direction, or compass heading, of polished rod within the magnetic field.

Or how about this:

[My disclosure [0094]]
… A combination of these sensors can provide an absolute orientation of the sensing device 301 and its rate of change through the various frames of reference 302.

But what about their disclosure? Sure they call out a three-axis vibration sensor, but never say why or how it's used.

[Their disclosure [0028]]
[0028] … The vibrational baseline may be derived from the sensor (e.g., an accelerometer) in three axes during the stroke of the pumping unit. …

Sidenote: You see why I have a problem with the examiner's assertion that I don't disclose a 3-axis vibration sensor. They even call it out that an accelerometer is a vibration sensor. But that's not the point of this post.

The point of § 112 is to disclose the "how" not just that you bolted on something that does it 3 times. Doing something in three axes isn't patentable over doing something in one axis unless you add something to it. All they're doing is throwing in "three-axes" as a term, but not providing that "why" or "how."

[Their disclosure [0051]]
[0051] … vibrational baseline may be derived from the vibration sensor subsystem 214 in more than one axis (e.g., three axes) during the stroke of the downhole pumping system 100. …

They talk about rotation in a plane and how the polished rod rotates vertically and the tubing rotator shaft rotates horizontally. But you don't need a three-axis sensor for that. It gives you a better reading, but a single-axis (in the correct axis) could give you the desired result.

My issue here is that the examiner found this a point of novelty when the disclosure completely fails to provide any insight as to what is special about a three-axis sensor in this context. It's a § 112 (and maybe even a § 101), but the examiner bumbled it into a point of novelty (incorrectly, in my opinion). It's a complete failure of examination.

Why this should be a knockout

§ 102 and § 103 are strong, but they leave room to argue — wording, claim arrangement, which embodiment a sentence lives in. I think I'd win those (see Dispatch No. 22 and Dispatch No. 23), but they're a fight.

§ 112 doesn't turn on a prior-art fight at all. It's judged on their four corners: the only question is whether their specification teaches what their claim covers. It doesn't. One honest caveat — and it's why I lean hardest on written description and definiteness: enablement alone lets a skilled reader fill gaps with what the field already knew, so the applicant's escape is “a person in this art already knew how.” But the hard part — pulling that direction-change needle out of a haystack of moving steel and a drifting field — is the how their four corners never supply, and written description and definiteness don't hand them even the “a skilled person already knew” escape. There's nothing for them to point at but the disclosure that isn't there.

And here's the part that still gets me — I couldn't even say so!

Remember the third-party preissuance submission I paid for, the one this whole blog opened with in Dispatch No. 1? It's the only tool the public gets before a patent issues. And by design, it can't touch § 112.

A preissuance submission under 35 U.S.C. § 122(e) lets you submit “any patent, published patent application, or other printed publication of potential relevance to the examination of the application” — plus a concise description of the relevance of each document. That's the entire mechanism: documents, and a factual description of why each one matters. The rules are explicit that you cannot turn that description into an argument. Per MPEP § 1134.01, “the concise description of relevance required by 35 U.S.C. 122(e) is limited to a factual description,” it “is not an invitation to a third party to propose rejections of the claims,” and it “must not rise to the level of a protest under 37 CFR 1.291.”

A § 112 defect isn't a document. There is no piece of prior art I can drop in the file that proves their specification fails to enable their claim — the failure lives entirely inside their own disclosure (and I suppose the examiner who should have known enough to question this). The one preissuance channel open to the public is built to surface prior art, i.e. §§ 102 and 103. It is structurally incapable of raising enablement, written description, definiteness — or, for that matter, § 101. There was no box on the form for “their own spec doesn't teach this,” and if I'd tried to write one in, it would have been bounced as an improper protest. If an examiner wants to allow a time machine, no one can correct that before it snowballs.

So tally up who could have raised the strongest ground before this patent issued. The examiner could have — and raised none (back to Dispatch No. 2). The public — me — was structurally locked out by the very rules of the only tool available. That leaves exactly one proactive door, after the fact, with a roughly $60,000 toll on it: the PGR. And it really is just the one — not even an inter partes review, the cheaper challenge with a far longer filing window, can reach this ground: by statute an IPR is limited to §§ 102 and 103 on patents and printed publications, so § 112 is categorically off the table there too. The PGR's nine-month clock is the only administrative shot at the strongest argument I have. (Yes, § 112 is also an invalidity defense in court — but only if someone sues me, and no one has; you can't raise a defense to a lawsuit that doesn't exist. The deck is stacked tightly enough that I can't even get hauled into court to make the argument for free.) The best argument against this patent is one nobody was allowed to make until the most expensive possible moment. If you want one clean illustration of how the deck is stacked against the inventor, that's it.

Dispatch No. 1 — I tried to prevent this mess — the preissuance fee I paid, for the tool that structurally can't raise this ground.
Dispatch No. 2 — Why a PGR? — where I first flagged that the examiner raised no § 112 at all.
Dispatch No. 13 — You Still Don't Believe Me About the Direction Change Thing? — the sinusoid “leap” their spec never enables.
Dispatch No. 14 — My Apology to Good Examiners — the examination that raised zero § 112 objections.
Dispatch No. 18 — Indefinite and Unenabled — the worked § 112 case: indefiniteness and the unenabled “leap,” in full.
Dispatch No. 20 — New material, not in the disclosure — the “previous stroke” written-description / new-matter problem.
Dispatch No. 21 — § 101 — What Even Counts as an Invention — where I noted the same hollowness looks like § 101 but really lands here.
Dispatch No. 22 — § 102 — Nothing New Here — where prior art anticipates their claims under § 102.
Dispatch No. 23 — § 103 — Obvious to Anyone in the Field — the previous dispatch; the backstop ground this one closes out.
Dispatch No. 25 — TL;DR; §§ 101, 102, 103, and 112 — the one-page recap tying it all together.
Dispatch No. 26 — TL;DR; All the system failures — the recap of every system failure; the never-raised § 112 is one of them.
Dispatch No. 28 — Let's Fix It — the proposed fix: make a full, thorough § 112 disclosure mandatory.
Dispatch No. 29 — Independence Day — the coda: this § 112 bargain is the end they never held up.

§ 103 — Obvious to Anyone in the Field

2026-06-12T12:00:00Z

§ 103 — if the whole “invention” is just “lift your foot,” it was obvious.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies rotation-sensing I disclosed first. This one is the § 103 ground: even if you don't buy straight anticipation, the gaps over the prior art are trivial and obvious. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

§ 103 — Obvious to anyone in the field

§ 102 asked the narrow question: is every element already sitting in one document? I say yes — twice over (2 independent documents). But suppose you don't buy it. Suppose you side with the applicant that some element isn't worded quite their way, or lives one paragraph over from where they'd like it. Fine. That gap is exactly what § 103 was written to close. § 103 says a claim is no good if the differences over the prior art would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art — not a genius, just an ordinary practitioner. And the "differences" here are trivial. The framework here has been settled since Graham v. John Deere Co., 383 U.S. 1 (1966): you weigh the scope and content of the prior art, the differences between it and the claim, and the level of ordinary skill in the art, and then ask whether those differences would have been obvious. Keep that lens on as we go — and keep this in mind while you do: neither the examiner nor the applicant's attorney is required to be a POSITA. The standard just assumes they are. By the end of this, you'll see exactly what that assumption costs.

Bounding to a stroke was already obvious

Let's take a closer look at what a POSITA already knew. The '537 patent's headline novelty is a sensing chain that limits rotation detection to the bounds of a stroke — first, second, and third change of direction. That's portrayed as novel. But a POSITA doesn't arrive at "bound the sensing to a stroke" through any flash of insight — the stroke is the fundamental unit of analysis in this field. § 103 doesn't require a smoking-gun reference that says those exact words; it requires that a POSITA would have gotten there without inventive effort. Hurst — the first significant patent in this space — makes that plain.

[Hurst background section]
With each stroke of the pumping unit, the rotator may rotate the rods a fraction of one revolution

That's Hurst's background section — not a novel teaching, but an established description of how the system works. A POSITA reading that background knows rotation sensing happens per stroke by definition — the stroke is already the natural analysis window. And Hurst didn't stop at acknowledging it in passing — it built a claim on it:

[Hurst claim 1]
wherein the expected value is based on strokes of a pumping unit in the reciprocating rod lift system and on a rotational angle associated with each of the strokes

So the field already understood that rotation is a per-stroke phenomenon, and had already staked a claim on a system that accounts for it. A POSITA starting there and adding any rotation sensor arrives at "bound the sensing to a stroke" without inventive effort — it's the only natural fit. That's textbook § 103: what the field already understands isn't something you can patent.

The § 102 angle — that my own published application explicitly shows how to do this particular sensing with a magnetometer — is covered in Dispatch No. 22. To be clear, Hurst isn't a ground I'm raising — the examiner already used it during prosecution (it was the basis of the § 103 rejections on the tubing-rotator claims), so it sits here as state-of-the-art context, not a fresh combination to lean on. Building a new § 103 on Hurst would just invite a § 325(d) "we already considered that" denial. The petition's § 103 runs on Phillips and Fyfe; Hurst just shows the field already treated the stroke as the unit of analysis.

More obviousness

Hurst covers the background knowledge case. For the combination case, Fyfe — two paragraphs of the same reference, on the same device — is cleaner still. The setup is almost ironic: the strongest § 103 argument comes from the very move you'd use to dodge § 102. First, the magnetometer that marks every stroke boundary — the direction changes themselves:

[Fyfe]
[0035] To improve position determined by double integration from accelerometer readings taken within the polished-rod dynamometer 261, we identify 1101 (FIG. 9) the same instant, or tick, of each stroke, such as with an external magnet and magnetometer, or recognize another repeating signal from the pumpjack combined with known pumpjack kinematics. We use this tick knowing the polished-rod velocity should be the same at the beginning and end of each identified stroke, and the polished-rod position should be the same at the beginning and end of the identified strokes. We also know, based upon the pumpjack design, the “range” of position from the maximum position minus the minimum position over the duration of the stroke.

[0037] … A robust search 1106 for maxima and/or minima in this velocity is then be [sic] used to detect strokes, a reference tick may be at a maximum or a minimum of velocity. This approach is preferable to working with the accelerometer signal alone because integration reduces noise. … In an alternative embodiment, both minima and maxima are identified within each stroke so that the stroke is separated into two pieces, such as time from minima to maxima and from maxima to minima. Scaling is then applied to each half of the stroke independently.

The gap here is that they use a distinct "magnet." But guess what? The wellhead and other components act as a magnet — in some cases in the traditional sense (they can be literally magnetized), and in all cases they alter the magnetic field. See my Figure 8.

And then, in an alternative embodiment, the rotation sensing during that stroke:

[Fyfe]
[0071] In an alternative embodiment, the polished-rod dynamometer 261 includes calibrated rotational accelerometers and rate-gyro sensors to sense rotational accelerations of the polished rod 224 … during each stroke of the polished rod…

A stickler will say: for anticipation you can't bolt one embodiment onto another. The rate-gyro lives in "an alternative embodiment," so — the argument goes — it can't count toward a single-reference § 102. OK. The second you say that, you've walked straight into § 103. Combining two embodiments of the same reference, on the same device (it's the same dynamometer 261), aimed at the same problem, is about as textbook an obviousness combination as exists. Same author, same machine, same disclosure, telling you to do the thing. There's no leap, and there's no surprise.

That's the whole idea of obviousness. You don't get a patent for snapping known pieces together the way they were already meant to snap, with a result anyone could predict. Same field, same purpose, predictable outcome — that's the definition of obvious, not the definition of an invention. And that's not just my gut talking: it's the KSR test (KSR Int'l Co. v. Teleflex Inc., 550 U.S. 398 (2007)) — known elements, combined by known methods, to yield a predictable result, with a reasonable expectation that it works. Nobody "taught away" from it. Nothing unexpected happened. You read [0035], you read [0071], and a competent person in the field combines them before lunch. And the reason to combine isn't hindsight reconstruction from my claim — it's written into Fyfe itself: the same device (dynamometer 261), the same goal. When the reference itself points you to put the pieces together, you're reading its teaching, not working backward from the answer — which is the standard answer to a "you're using hindsight" charge, and it holds here.

Reason to combine

It's not enough for a § 103 to just stitch together a couple random unconnected disclosures. There has to be a reason to combine them — and here it's a fundamental task in the art: everything we do in the analysis of this type of system splits the continuous motion into discrete strokes. That alone makes the combination obvious. If you don't believe my Figure 8 discloses how to split the stroke based on the profiled magnetic field readings, you can pull that from other prior art within reason. There's a wealth of well-known ways to split the stroke: inclinometers, accelerometers, string potentiometers, magnetic switches placed all over the mechanical linkage components. Books, automation controller manuals, even tradeshow giveaway mousepads.

Fyfe and Mine

And if you still want every reference to stand on its own two feet — then combine the two references. Fyfe and my own published application sit in the same narrow corner of the world: downhole pump-rod instrumentation, the same problem, the same family of inertial and magnetic sensors, specifically targeted at rotation sensing. The motivation to put them together isn't some clever litigation theory — it's right there in the references: they're targeted at the same problem. That articulated reason, with its predictable result, is exactly the "rational underpinning" the law asks for — not hindsight, and not "because the claim says so." Garden-variety § 103.

Go back and read Dispatch No. 4. That's not a legal basis for combining under § 103, but it should give you some context about how closely related these documents are. Post 2018, combining these references under § 103 is fair game.

And the "gap" is nothing anyway

After all of that, look at what the supposed gap even is. The claim's headline novelty is bounding the sensing to a single stroke — first change of direction, second, third. I've beaten this to death in Dispatch No. 19: a stroke is its direction changes. A pumpjack is a four-bar linkage — a mechanism older than nearly every machine you can name — and it goes up, stops, comes down, stops. Those stops are the direction changes. Disclosing "sense it over a stroke" and then treating "first, second, third direction change" as a separate inventive leap is like patenting a staircase and then re-patenting "a thing that has steps to climb and then descend."

You don't need a person of ordinary skill for that. A high-school physics student gets there — the PBASITA (Person of Below Average Skill In The Art) I coined in the § 102 post gets there. This is the "we painted it orange" move all over again: take something fully disclosed, re-describe one obvious corner of it in fresh words, and call the re-description an invention. § 103 exists precisely to stop that. These are exactly the kind of differences a person in the field fills in without thinking — which is the legal way of saying there's nothing here.

Claim 13 got a § 103!

That's the law. Here's what actually happened in prosecution. This illustrates the amendment chain that led from a § 102 to a § 103 — and how the examiner still failed to stop it.

Remember, claim 13 got a § 102 in the First OA. Fully anticipated.

Here's the game plan: The examiner said something about a vibration sensor not being anticipated by me. OK, try adding that vibration sensor to the claim to weasel out of the § 102. And here's where the examiner sort of did the right thing (assuming the accelerometer isn't the very definition of a vibration sensor… I still have a problem with that).

Straight from the Final OA:

[Final OA, page 14]
Therefore, it would have been obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art prior to the effective filing date of the claimed invention to have modified Phillips to incorporate the teachings of Puwanto by including: a vibration measuring device in order to give early warning of component failure.

OK, let's assume I didn't explicitly say a vibration sensor in three axes (I did, but let's run with this to show the § 103). And let's assume early warning of rotation-component failure wasn't the whole point of my invention (it was). This should have been a straightforward § 102.

But in the § 103 sense (for illustrative purposes), this other reference is obvious to combine with mine to add the vibration measuring device (that definitely isn't an accelerometer, because that's not a "vibration measuring device"). That's an obvious combination and perfectly suited for a § 103 (but again, I disclosed all of this, so it really should have been a § 102… but since it's obviously combinable § 103 works).

Recap: claim 13 drew a § 102 in the First OA, then a § 103 in the Final — both anticipated and obvious. Pretty comprehensive. What changed going into the Final was the added vibration sensor, which is what pulled in Puwanto for the § 103.

Only afterward, at the RCE, did they yank the vibration sensor back out and swap in brand-new material — the stuff about comparing to a previous stroke that wasn't disclosed — and that's what finally got it allowed. New material bolted on at the end doesn't unwind a § 102 and a § 103, unless you have a lazy examiner, I suppose.

Puwanto isn't even a good reference

The Puwanto citation that both my examiner and their examiner leaned on was a stretch. Drilling (making the well) and production (getting the oil out) are very different disciplines. There are much closer and equally relevant citations. Here's a much better one. That's a comment on the quality of the examiner's combination, not a concession — the § 103 on the core stroke-bounding claim doesn't need Puwanto at all. Puwanto only entered the picture because of the vibration sensor addition, which was always the sideshow. Since it was pulled in the RCE, I guess that bypasses the § 103, but that doesn't fix the earlier § 102.

You can follow the claim adds and deletes here:

Claim 13 had the vibration sensor added. That didn't work (see the § 103), so they removed it and added the new material. I can't make this up. It's right there in the amendment chain in the documents above. The vibration sensor was always a sideshow — the headline novelty, bounding the sensing to a single stroke, had its own prior art problem, as the foregoing analysis shows. And the examiner who should have caught it never did.

What actually bugs me about the § 103

Here's the part that gets me: the examiner did raise a § 103 in the Final Rejection. Just not on the claim that mattered. Claim 13 — the overly broad one that actually slipped through — never got the § 103 treatment it had coming. The obviousness analysis landed on claims that were going to be fine anyway, while the one claim that needed a hard look skated past untouched.

That's the same pattern from Dispatch No. 16: claim 1 gets the scrutiny, the later independent claims coast, and an applicant who knows that can park their broadest claim down the list and bank on nobody running it through the wringer. Here, nobody did.

It goes further than just § 103. That same Final OA's § 102 analysis has the same problem: claim 13 appears in the rejection header — "Claims 1-7 and 13-15 are rejected under 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1) as being anticipated by Phillips" — but the body of that rejection analyzes claims 19-20, which are unrelated. The examiner listed claim 13 and then wrote the analysis for different claims. Whether claim 13 got a substantive § 102 look in the Final, or just got swept into a header nobody backed up with real analysis, is genuinely unclear. No real § 103 on claim 13, and — in this Final OA — possibly no real § 102 behind that header either (the First OA's § 102 was genuine; this Final redo wasn't). By the time it mattered, claim 13 was sailing through on fumes.

Pick your lane

So pick a lane. If every element is there as I read it — and it is — the claim is anticipated under § 102. If you'd rather quibble that an element is one embodiment over or one synonym off, then closing that gap is obvious under § 103. The claim doesn't make it through either door. Unless you have a lazy examiner.

§ 103 is the sturdiest of the bunch: it holds whether or not the Board adopts my stroke construction, where the § 102 anticipation needs that construction to land. My favorite objection is § 112 — enablement, where you claim a result without teaching how to reach it — and that's the § 112 case I mentioned in the previous post. I'll come back to it in the next post.

§ 103 is a very good reason to put this garbage patent out of its misery.

Dispatch No. 14 — My Apology to Good Examiners — the systemic context behind examination failures, and why the criticism isn't aimed at examiners who do the job right.
Dispatch No. 19 — Bounding to a single stroke — the construction fight at the heart of the § 112 case.
Dispatch No. 20 — New material, not in the disclosure — the “previous stroke” written-description / new-matter problem.
Dispatch No. 21 — § 101 — What Even Counts as an Invention — two dispatches back; the front-door eligibility discussion that opens this run through the statutes.
Dispatch No. 22 — § 102 — Nothing New Here — the previous dispatch; anticipation, where this obviousness argument picks up the "alternative embodiment" thread.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — the next dispatch.
Dispatch No. 25 — TL;DR; §§ 101, 102, 103, and 112 — the one-page recap tying it all together.

§ 102 — Nothing New Here

2026-06-11T12:00:00Z

§ 102 — one reference already shows every element (a second covers it too). Nothing new here.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies rotation-sensing I disclosed first. This one is the § 102 ground: every element of the key claim already sits in a single prior-art reference — my own publication, and a second document too. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

§ 102 — The examiner's objection on the key claim

The § 102 rejection was on claim 7 — the direction-change claim, which the applicant later folded into amended claim 1 in the RCE. Claim 7 is the one requiring that rotation sensing be gated to a single stroke, delimited by three direction changes: begin at the first, continue through the second, cease at the third. The examiner cited my own publication as anticipating every element. The applicant pushed back. Then the examiner folded.

§ 102 is a good one — if it's applied right. It wasn't. The examiner repeated the same § 102 objection twice, and the second time it was watered down instead of strengthened. That had me concerned. The examiner wasn't paying attention. But it was a Final. How much can I complain about that?

Here's the examiner's entire analysis of claim 7 in the Final OA:

[Final OA, Regarding Claim 7]
Phillips further teaches the sensor system of claim 5, wherein the processor subsystem is configured to continue sampling the rotational velocity along substantially an entire stroke of the at least one rod, the sampling beginning at a first change of direction of the at least one rod, continuing through a second change of direction of the at least one rod, and ceasing at a third change of direction of the at least one rod [0029; 0110].

That's it. The most important claim in the application — the one with the three direction changes, the one the applicant had spent the whole prosecution trying to protect — gets two paragraph citations and no explanation of how I teach any of it. No walkthrough. No mapping of the elements. Just [0029; 0110]. There were several other paragraphs and at least two figures worth citing. But there it is, a § 102. Not a thorough one, but a § 102 nonetheless. That's what the applicant had to beat.

Let's jump straight into the applicant arguments/remarks (RCE):

You can read it on page 2. This is the core argument, and I'll take it line by line.

[Their RCE Arguments]
The Final Office Action points to various generic statements in Phillips references stokes [sic ^†] and potential differences in sensing rotation and/or axial movement.

I don't even know what to make of this one. The applicant seems to be making my case for me — that the examiner's analysis wasn't thorough or detailed. Think about it: if the examiner had written a tight, element-by-element mapping with specific citations to my disclosure, there'd be nothing to call "generic." By complaining about the quality of the rejection, the applicant is implicitly conceding that a rigorous one would have been harder to answer.

† They keep misspelling this — their spellcheck must be set to Spicoli. You might not believe me, but I know a guy who knows a guy who supposedly knew the real Spicoli. ↩

[Their RCE Arguments]
However, there is no disclosure in Phillips of the particular chain of sensing events, including explicitly reciting the conditions for the starting and stopping events of the rotational sensing, as detailed in amended claim 1.

expressly or ~~inherently~~.

Their earlier remarks set up the governing test for § 102: anticipation means "each and every element as set forth in the claim is found, either expressly or inherently described, in a single prior art reference" — that's Verdegaal, which they cite. That was in the first response, but not in the RCE. This is important because inherently is an operative word that they conveniently omitted in the RCE remarks.

My Fig. 8 — field lines through the stroke.

Read that again: expressly or inherently. One of the applicant's implications (RCE) is that the prior art needs to recite those elements in the exact words. But that has never been the test. The MPEP says it: anticipation is not an ipsissimis verbis test — "identity of terminology is not required" (In re Bond, 910 F.2d 831). That's the wording point: same element, different words, still anticipates. Separately — and this is a distinct doctrine, the other half of Verdegaal's "expressly or inherently" — an element that's never spelled out at all can still anticipate if it's inherently (necessarily) present. Different words, or no words but necessarily there: either way it counts. And mine is there both ways: my Figure 8 inherently discloses the better part of this — a picture is worth a thousand words, and there it is. Pair that with the examiner twice confirming that I teach this, and the anticipation argument should have been airtight.

[Their RCE Arguments]
First, there is no disclosure in Phillips that rotation sensing only occurs once a direction change is sensed, indicating that a new stroke is beginning.

But I do — there's my whole [0082] bit where I say "An accelerometer can be used to detect the accelerations imparted by the directional reversals caused by stroking action." I also talk about the magnetometer in this same paragraph: "The magnetometer experiences a range of field distortions as the sensor moves closer and further from steel objects in the pumping system. Short term variation in the magnetometer readings can therefore also be indicative of stroking action."

You might say "stroking action" isn't the same as a "direction change," but I discuss the direction changes in that same paragraph. I even tie the two together with the stroking action. That's a straight throughline that clearly and explicitly states this. This is the unresolved, undiscussed, relevant prior art that shows the examiner half-assed this examination.

I think it's clear that I state this explicitly: I'm showing here that the magnetometer can do it too. But that's why the "inherently" is also part of Verdegaal. Even if you argue I didn't explicitly state it, you have to admit it's there implicitly. The term inherently is so important — and it's so frustrating that they could just drop that key phrase and argue in the RCE that it had to be stated "explicitly". It's right there in their RCE Arguments — they conveniently omitted "inherently," making it seem like explicitly was the bar, when it clearly isn't.

The examiner should have known the difference. The resulting Notice of Allowance doesn't indicate that was the case.

Another misrepresentation? See a pattern forming?

Raising the bar to explicitly — while quietly dropping inherently — is, in my view, the misrepresentation. The applicable standard, their own Verdegaal cite, requires neither exact wording nor explicit statement of every element. Misrepresenting that bar back to the examiner in the RCE is highly unethical, in my opinion.

My paragraph [0082] is a technically accurate description — I'm not grafting a hand-wavy direction change conclusion onto a sensor that can't, by itself, cleanly detect one. § 102 doesn't care if it works, but I do. The magnetometer can pick up stroking action, but it's hard. A magnetometer does not provide a change in direction on its own. You need to do a lot of processing to determine that. I would have more accurately called it a proximity reading. Oh wait, I did:

[My disclosure]
[00132] … The magnitude of the distortions can dominate the reading depending on the proximity of the sensor to the ferrous material present in the pumping system. The wellhead 801, horsehead 804, counterweights 814, etc. all create distortions and act at different longitudinal positions during the motion of the sensor. …

You should go read my disclosure paragraphs [00128]-[00133]. It's mostly on the calibration of the magnetometer because that is the more interesting problem. Still [00132] provides the more precise description of what a magnetometer senses. I wouldn't use the term "direction change" because that's technically wrong. You can see increasing and decreasing field strength, caused by changing proximity, which is inferable as a direction change, but simply saying a direction change oversimplifies the problem. It took me 6 paragraphs to attempt to describe the problem. But this is all straying way outside the bounds of § 102.

For the magnetometer I don't even need inherency, because [0082] says it expressly: short-term magnetometer variation “can therefore also be indicative of stroking action.” That's the element, on the page, in plain words. The fact that it's hard to do isn't a § 102 problem at all — difficulty goes to enablement or obviousness, never to whether the disclosure is there. (I save the real inherency argument for the part that truly can't not be there: three direction changes necessarily bounding a stroke.) Remember, I'm an engineer. I wanted to get this technically right. I wasn't trying to BS my way through the process.

Does my disclosure actually gate the sensing to the stroke? Yep.

Sensing rotation during a stroke is one thing — the claim wants the sampling to begin at the first change of direction, continue through the second, and cease at the third. That's a gating step. Does my disclosure gate it that way, or does it just sense whenever it feels like it?

It gates. My disclosure doesn't just sense rotation around the clock and carve a stroke out after the fact — the processor only goes looking for rotation while the unit is stroking. I say it three different ways:

[My disclosure, [0026]]
…the processor is configured to only generate the alarm during periods where the unit is stroking and rotation is not present. Rotation during idle periods is not expected and therefore does not need to be considered.

[My disclosure, [0041]]
…the processor is not required to determine rod rotation speed, but only to detect if rod rotation is actually taking place during periods of expected rotation, namely, when the rod lift system is stroking.

[My disclosure, [0087]]
…If the pumping unit 110 is running [i.e., stroking], then the processor knows to expect and detect changes in rotational position.

So the rotation sensing is fenced to the stroking window. And how do I know the unit is stroking? By the directional reversals themselves — back to [0082], the "directional reversals caused by stroking action" are exactly what "indicate that the pumping unit is stroking." Stack those two facts: rotation sensing is gated to stroking, and stroking is marked by the direction changes. The sampling therefore has to begin at a direction change and cease at a later one. That's not a bonus step I'm reading into the page — it's where my disclosure's own gating switches on and off. The claim just slaps the labels "first," "second," and "third" onto those necessary and inherent stroke boundaries.

And here's the kicker: their patent makes the argument for me. Their own specification defines those three changes as marking "the completion of a complete up and down stroke" (the '537 patent, [0049]). By their own lexicography, "a stroke" is "first-change-through-third-change." So "sample over a single stroke" and "sample from the first to the third direction change" are the same act, by their definition, not mine. That's about as pure as inherency gets: it can't not be there.

How did the examiner forget this? It was all laid out so clearly. When you only hear from one side, you start believing the arguments. It's sad, but not surprising, given the way the US patent system was built.

Unnecessary complication, for a necessary feature

[Their RCE Arguments]
Second, there is no disclosure in Phillips that the sensing then continues during a second change in direction.

Keep doing what you're doing. At what point can you stop listing out things that are necessarily there? If you do something over the course of a stroke, you don't just maybe hit a second direction change — a full stroke necessarily contains it. That's the strict kind of inherency § 102 actually requires: not "a POSITA would probably see it," but "it can't not be there." Same with the other two changes in direction. They are fundamentally part of "a stroke". We'd more commonly call those the beginning and end of the stroke. Remember, 4-bar linkages are thousands of years old. They probably came shortly after the wheel was invented. That's how fundamental it is.

And I talk about that a lot. More than once. About 20 times and in different contexts. A stroke is a fundamental unit of analysis in this art. It's not overly complicated. Not the kind of thing that requires a POSITA. The thing goes up and down… We analyze one of those up and down motions to see what it's doing. It gives us a snapshot of the system in one glance. It's that fundamental.

Another well-defined and necessary feature

[Their RCE Arguments]
Finally, there is no disclosure in Phillips of then ceasing the sensing once a third change in direction is detected.

Again, ceasing the sensing at a direction change is the very definition of a stroke boundary. There's a deeper discussion here that I'll save for another § 112 post. There's a very clear technical hurdle here, but that's way off topic for a § 102.

[Their RCE Arguments]
There appears to be no particulars in Phillips relating to other actions taking [sic] during only single stroke besides looking to the data from a single stroke.

From my [0029], a paragraph cited twice by the examiner: "In this instance, the accelerometer and gyroscope are configured to determine immediate rotational deflection of the bridle assembly during the course of a single stroke by way of an inertial reference."

That's it, that's their argument, directly refuted by the very paragraph the examiner cited, yet the examiner just said "uncle" and let it through. But clearly I disclosed each and every element, provided you understand the most basic mechanics of what a "stroke" is. I'm pulling from multiple paragraphs, but Arkley only bars stitching together disclosures not directly related to each other.

There's a clear throughline from [0029] to [0082]. These aren't disconnected concepts. The stroke ties them together. These paragraphs all describe one and the same sensor system — that's related disclosure, not the grab-bag Arkley forbids. (Their "say it exactly how we say it" implication is a separate mistake, and it's wrong too — the things all need to be in there and reasonably understood as such, not recited in those specific words.) That's what I have, all disclosed in this document.

All you really need is my Figure 8 and the [0029] quote above. That's it. That covers it. [0082] just makes it crystal clear and irrefutable (but still easily ignorable). There's also the [00128]-[00133] calibration sequence and [0026], [0041], and [0087]. I have a lot of content. The fact that the examiner missed, ignored, or just never bothered to look is quite disheartening.

I'm not done yet

That's one reference. My disclosure alone gets the § 102 job done. But remember that other document from Dispatch No. 4? The one the examiner cited in the First OA and then never mentioned again?

Each and every element. Let's go through this again with a separate document. Not combining references. This one works entirely on its own too:

First, there is no disclosure in ~~Phillips~~ Fyfe that rotation sensing only occurs once a direction change is sensed, indicating that a new stroke is beginning.

Second, there is no disclosure in ~~Phillips~~ Fyfe that the sensing then continues during a second change in direction.

Finally, there is no disclosure in ~~Phillips~~ Fyfe of then ceasing the sensing once a third change in direction is detected.

There appears to be no particulars in ~~Phillips~~ Fyfe relating to other actions taking [sic] during only single stroke besides looking to the data from a single stroke.

[Fyfe]
[0032] … other displacement sensors … a magnetic sensor in the monitoring device … provides direct measurements of minimum and maximum points, and a present position in, the pumpjack cycle; in this embodiment the measured position of the pumpjack cycle is reported with measured axial load and any observed vibration.

OK, I'm omitting intervening text to focus on the key elements. You'd probably say that is obscuring what they are actually talking about and that this paragraph is actually a stretch. Go read it yourself. It's talking about a lot more. Why? Because there's a lot more to talk about. Also, remember that's why "inherently" from Verdegaal is so important. It cuts off the strict "exactly the way we say it" argument this applicant was leaning on so heavily.

That's the problem with the "you need to say exactly what we say, how we say it" argument. That's not what § 102 is. This paragraph is enough to establish the elements in order in a reasonable reading. Not by a POSITA, but by someone with basic knowledge. A Person of Below Average Skill In The Art (PBASITA… is there a legal term for this? Say a high-school physics student). The key in this prior art is the "minimum and maximum". That's the change in direction. Thrice makes a stroke. That's not a stretch. There's vibration in there too.

Interestingly, this document calls it a cycle. No one calls it a cycle in the "Art", but I'll throw this fun fact in — these guys' main business is bicycle sensors, not oil field sensors. The terms "cycle" and "stroke" can be used interchangeably. They mean the same thing in just about any practical context here.

Here's the whole paragraph [0035]:

[Fyfe]
[0035] To improve position determined by double integration from accelerometer readings taken within the polished-rod dynamometer 261, we identify 1101 (FIG. 9) the same instant, or tick, of each stroke, such as with an external magnet and magnetometer, or recognize another repeating signal from the pumpjack combined with known pumpjack kinematics. We use this tick knowing the polished-rod velocity should be the same at the beginning and end of each identified stroke, and the polished-rod position should be the same at the beginning and end of the identified strokes. We also know, based upon the pumpjack design, the “range” of position from the maximum position minus the minimum position over the duration of the stroke.

That literally spells out the three direction changes on the magnetometer. It's in the context of the accelerometer, which is a far more interesting and useful concept for how we use accelerometers. I'll come back to this in a later post, but the accelerometer gives you a good position with a critical flaw. The magnetometer has problems with precise position, but is immune to that specific flaw. That's related to this, but a much bigger and better-known problem in the "Art," so clearly that would be the focus of the disclosure. In disclosing it, Fyfe also puts every piece the applicant claims is novel right there on the page (and no, it doesn't have to use their exact words — § 102 never required that).

Hindsight wordsmithing is not innovation

That's the problem with the whole workaround hindsight wordsmithing. There's a much cooler problem to be solved, so you disclose that. You focus on the real innovative problem. The less interesting stuff gets disclosed along the way, but isn't as interesting on its own, so it's there, but not the core focus. You don't waste words on things that are clearly part of the bigger thing you're disclosing. But then someone else, later and with hindsight, can focus on that thing you mentioned in passing… because it wasn't super critical. That's not innovation. There has to be consideration that the larger discussion also covered the less interesting thing, even if that wasn't the core focus of the text. That is the whole point of § 102 and the "inherency."

The magnetometer can detect ends of stroke (since that's another way to say a direction change)… that's in there.
Using a magnetometer as part of that… that's in there.
Doing rotation sensing during that sensed stroke… that's in there.
Vibration sensor… that's in there (explicitly in Fyfe, in mine you have to know that an accelerometer is inherently a vibration sensor).

None of this is a stretch. Every element is right there in the prior art. In two separate documents, each disclosing it in more than sufficient detail alone and independently. See Dispatch No. 4 for the back story on those two documents.

Now, the missing piece is doing rotation sensing only during a stroke (or cycle, or the direction changes, or whatever else you want to call it). For that we have a whole section titled Rod Rotator Monitor:

[Fyfe]
[0071] In an alternative embodiment, the polished-rod dynamometer 261 includes calibrated rotational accelerometers and rate-gyro sensors to sense rotational accelerations of the polished rod 224 resulting from each yank of the handle 219 of the rod rotator during each stroke of the polished rod …

Sensing, using a gyro, during a stroke. So Fyfe lays out every piece — the stroke boundaries from the magnetometer tick, plus rotation sensing during the stroke. What it doesn't spell out, in so many words, is gating the rotation sampling to those three direction changes (Fyfe uses the tick to clean up accelerometer position, not to start and stop the gyro). But once every piece is sitting on the same device, the gating follows from the device's own operation.

Now, a stickler will jump on the words "in an alternative embodiment" and say: for § 102 you can't bolt one embodiment onto another and call the result a single anticipating disclosure. Fair enough — but these aren't unrelated embodiments. [0035] ties the magnetometer "tick" to the polished-rod dynamometer 261, and [0071]'s rate-gyro rides on that same 261. It's one device described across a few paragraphs — the same hardware, the same application. Arkley's "picking and choosing" bar is at its weakest when both disclosures live on the same piece of hardware. Every element, every arrangement, in one device. That's § 102.

(And if someone insists [0071] is truly separate, they've handed me § 103 — combining two embodiments of the same reference on the same device for the same purpose is about as textbook an obviousness case as exists. The claim doesn't survive either way. But I don't think it comes to that.)

Note: Fyfe is actually a more complete prior art reference because it also contains the Tubing Rotation stuff for their claims 8-9 and 16-18. No need to combine separate references — Fyfe carries those claims on its own. See the section titled Tubing Rotation Monitoring. So when the examiner "forgot" to cite this in the Final Rejection and the NOA, that is a huge oversight.

Again, this was all in my Third-Party Preissuance Submission.

My real issue

My real grievance here is how easily the examiner dropped the § 102 objection raised in two consecutive office actions — the First OA and the Final. No discussion, just basically, "ok, you convinced me." I want an explanation of how it's not disclosed like you said it was, twice in a row. The public deserves explanation, not just me. This was all too easily dismissed.

Legal mumbo jumbo

I hate the way legal documents bury their citations. Here are the authorities they leaned on — and they actually set two separate bars, which the applicant blurs together. The first is wording: a reference doesn't have to use the claim's exact words (In re Bond — "identity of terminology is not required"). The second is real, and tougher: every element has to be there arranged as in the claim — in the same relationship and order, not merely present somewhere on the page (Net MoneyIN; and the other half of In re Bond, which says the elements "must be arranged as required by the claim"). The applicant's "chain of sensing events … starting … continues during a second … ceasing at a third" is really an arrangement argument wearing a wording argument's clothes — and it has a clean answer on its own terms.

That answer: the arrangement isn't merely reasonably there — it's there inherently, and inherent disclosure anticipates exactly as well as an express one (Verdegaal). And the inherency here is the definitional kind: it falls straight out of what "a stroke" is. By the '537's own lexicography, "a stroke" just is "first-change-through-third-change" (the '537 patent, [0049]). So sense anything "over a stroke" and you have, necessarily and in this exact sequence, a first change of direction, then a second, then a third — not because any single reference happens to spell out three reversals on its face, but because that sequence is what defines and bounds a stroke. So my disclosure clears both bars: every element, and their claimed arrangement, because the arrangement can't not be there. (The gating section above walks through exactly how the gating locks to those three changes.) Likewise that other prior art. Each document on its own, not combined. Only one was lightly discussed by the examiner. The other? Completely absent after the first Office Action.

Verdegaal Brothers v. Union Oil Co. of California, 2 USPQ2d 1051, 1053 (Fed. Cir. 1987)
Richardson v. Suzuki Motor Co., 9 USPQ2d 1913, 1920 (Fed. Cir. 1989)
Net MoneyIN Inc. v. VeriSign Inc., 545 F.3d 1359, 1371 (Fed. Cir. 2008)
In re Arkley, 455 F.2d 586, 587 (C.C.P.A. 1972)

Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the earlier time this same idea was good enough to copy.
Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — the third-party submission I'd already filed.
Dispatch No. 14 — My Apology to Good Examiners — the examination that raised this ground twice and then abandoned it.
Dispatch No. 20 — New material, not in the disclosure — the new-matter limitation that, to the extent it means anything, I already disclosed.
Dispatch No. 21 — § 101 — What Even Counts as an Invention — the previous dispatch.
Dispatch No. 23 — § 103 — Obvious to Anyone in the Field — where the "alternative embodiment" combination becomes an even easier obviousness case.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — the § 112 problem; its § 112(f) argument is the alternative to this dispatch's broad-claim § 102 reading.
Dispatch No. 25 — TL;DR; §§ 101, 102, 103, and 112 — the one-page recap tying it all together.
Dispatch No. 26 — TL;DR; All the system failures — the system-failure recap, including the dropped "inherently" § 102 standard.

§ 101 — What Even Counts as an Invention

2026-06-10T12:00:00Z

§ 101 — A bare sine wave with a sensor strapped on "shouldn't" get past the gate.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies rotation-sensing I disclosed first. This one is the § 101 eligibility discussion — really a § 112 problem in disguise, and the one ground I'm not formally pressing. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

What even counts as an invention

It should be inherently obvious that I am not qualified to talk about any of this. If you think any of this is legal advice or grounded legal opinion, you are probably worse off than I am. This is just me opining on various topics from my experiences in the process. Consider all of this as just tall tales and fantasy from a crackpot inventor.

§ 101 — Worth a discussion, but not a full argument

Fine, the examiner didn't raise a § 101 — and honestly, I'm a little sad they didn't even take a look, because there was good reason to. Chalk it up as one more thing the examiner never reached. But I'm not going to hang my hat on this one, and I'm not pressing it as a ground in the PGR. It's a sensor, a widget, a device. It probably passes the § 101 smell test.

But § 101 has another caveat. Even a physical box can fail it if what you've really claimed is just a math relationship or a fact of nature with a sensor strapped on. You can't patent E = mc² by adding "…on a computer." The question isn't whether you built a thing — it's whether you added a real inventive application, or just pointed at a correlation and called it an invention. That two-part question has a name — the Alice/Mayo test: first, is the claim directed to an abstract idea or natural law (here, the bare correlation between a sinusoid and a direction change)? And if so, second, is there an inventive concept — something beyond generic, off-the-shelf parts doing their ordinary jobs — that turns it into a real application? Strip this claim to its core and you can see where a § 101 challenge would aim — step two: a magnetometer reading a magnetic field and a processor comparing values are the kind of generic, off-the-shelf parts that don't obviously add an inventive concept. I'm flagging that angle, not running it — it's exactly the sort of thin § 101 theory I'd rather not lean on, and I'm not pleading it — but that's the hook a § 101 argument would reach for, if one were on the table.

My issue with this whole disclosure is the leap from "hey the magnetic field is a sinusoid, and so is the motion of the pumping unit, they must be the same thing" to an actual patent. This is really a § 112 issue because they didn't enable that leap — they just wave their hands and say we can magically sense a change in direction from it. They didn't add anything inventive here. I make the full § 112 case in Dispatch No. 18. § 112 is so important, I'll probably do another post on it.

The way they frame it, it sure looks like a § 101 problem: just watch a sinusoid wiggle and read off the direction change. Framed that simply, you've claimed a bare correlation — a fact of nature with a sensor strapped on — and that's the kind of thing § 101 is supposed to keep out. But here's the catch: difficulty doesn't get you out of § 101. A claim doesn't become eligible just because the task is hard (or portrayed as overly simplistic, as is done here); it becomes eligible when it recites a real inventive application, not when it points at a correlation and calls it an invention. So you can't have it both ways. Either it really is that simple — in which case you're in eligibility territory, the bare-correlation question I'm flagging but not pressing — or it's genuinely hard (which it is), in which case they owed the reader an actual teaching of how, and the defect lands squarely at § 112, which is the ground I am pressing. They want the § 101 simplicity to make it sound real, and the § 112 sophistication to make it sound patentable.

On its face vs. read against the disclosure

Here's the nuance, and it's the whole reason I call this a discussion and not a full argument. Read the claim in isolation and it's fine. It's an apparatus — sensors, a processor, the usual furniture — and I'd let it walk through § 101 without much fuss. Here's the operative bit, from their amended Claim 13:

[Their amended claim]
…detecting the rotational values with the rotation sensor subsystem during a current stroke… comparing the rotational values with previously sensed rotational values… during a previous stroke… to determine if rotation… has occurred.

Strip the boilerplate and that's "measure a value, compare it to the last value, decide if it changed." On its own, fine — plenty of valid patents do exactly that, because the how is where the invention lives.

But now read it against their disclosure. The disclosure never teaches that how (that's the § 112 case in Dispatch No. 18). Strip the enabling teaching away and what's left isn't an inventive application of the comparison — it's the bare comparison itself, the naked correlation with a sensor strapped on. That's the version § 101 is supposed to keep out. The claim didn't get more abstract; the disclosure failed to give it the substance that would have kept it concrete. That's the tension: the same hollowness that makes this a § 112 problem is what drags the claim back toward the § 101 line. Two symptoms, one disease — a claim reciting a result the specification never earns. A fair caveat, though: doctrinally § 101 and § 112 are separate inquiries — eligibility is judged on the claim itself, and no court is going to formally fold an enablement failure into the § 101 analysis. So treat this as a thematic link — two symptoms pointing at one underlying emptiness — rather than a clean stand-alone § 101 argument. Which is exactly why I keep saying the real fight is § 112.

A diligent examiner would have at least run it through the § 101 abstract-idea test before waving it past — maybe the examiner did run it and it just never made it to the OA, but hey, what do I know.

The point in all of this is that the problem as they frame it is way more complicated than they let on. I'll come back to this in another § 112 post.

In terms of the PGR, it's not something to devote much word count to. It should be discussed, but the other sections are much stronger.

Dispatch No. 13 — You Still Don't Believe Me About the Direction Change Thing? — the sinusoid / direction-change leap this section leans on.
Dispatch No. 14 — My Apology to Good Examiners — the examiner who never ran this test.
Dispatch No. 18 — Indefinite and Unenabled — the full § 112 case I keep deferring to here.
Dispatch No. 20 — New material, not in the disclosure — the previous dispatch.
Dispatch No. 22 — § 102 — Nothing New Here — the next dispatch.
Dispatch No. 23 — § 103 — Obvious to Anyone in the Field — where the "alternative embodiment" combination becomes an even easier obviousness case.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — the § 112 ground where this "looks like § 101" hollowness really lands.
Dispatch No. 25 — TL;DR; §§ 101, 102, 103, and 112 — the one-page recap tying it all together.

New material, not in the disclosure

2026-06-09T12:00:00Z

Sliding in "New Material" the disclosure never contained.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies rotation-sensing I disclosed first. This one catches a claim limitation — the “previous stroke” — that appears nowhere in their own disclosure: new matter the examiner waved through. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

New material

OK, if they want to split hairs about me not saying something exactly like they said it, here's one on them. And this one is legit. A claim element that was never disclosed. It involves the concept of a "previous stroke." Go ahead and look for that in their disclosure. Ordinarily I wouldn't get hung up on something this pedantic, but they did it to me, so this is fair play.

Unfounded argument

Let's look at The RCE, page 5:

[Their Arguments/Remarks from the RCE]
Further, while Phillips discussed some comparison of values, Phillips does not disclose using the value detected during a previous stroke to determine if rotation of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system has occurred. [Their emphasis, not mine]

Fig. 6 — my rotation/stroke state logic.

I haven't even mentioned my Figure 6 yet. Here it is (see my Third-Party Preissuance Submission). The whole point of this invention is that you repeatedly compare this value over time. That's obvious… I think. Imagine if your smoke detector only reported that your house is not on fire once and then never checked again. In this case it doesn't have to be constant, but you have to keep checking it.

In my opinion that argument above, about the previous stroke, is pretty much false — and I think the record shows it. How so? Because A) I do disclose it, and B) they don't even disclose it in their application. I'll get to this below.

But first, my disclosure. Remember in Dispatch No. 19 I talked about the "Intra-stroke" concept (within a stroke). Here's a passage from my disclosure:

[My disclosure]
[0043] …A change in intra-stroke torsional deflection over many strokes, followed by a rapid reduction, indicates a buildup of torque in the rod-string due to frictional resistance down-hole, followed by a sharp reduction in deflection when the rotational resistance is overcome and applied torque is lost.

"Over many strokes" should be equivalent to "a previous stroke"… right? There's a previous stroke in there… in one of the many strokes.

But it gets better

Pot, meet kettle — accusing me of not disclosing what they never disclosed.

Did they even disclose this?

But there is a very good argument that I disclose exactly this. Look at [0043] and my Figure 6 above. That is why it's so frustrating. Like with the vibration sensor, I did disclose it, but the examiner is acquiescing to the applicant's arguments blindly, or with the weakest of pushback. There was no way for me to correct these false statements as they were happening.

Two different concepts

One: their claim 13 recites “previous stroke,” but their own specification never describes that comparison — not in those words, and, more to the point, not in any form. That's a written-description failure under § 112(a): the spec has to show the inventor actually possessed what the claim recites (the Ariad v. Eli Lilly standard). I'll come back to § 112 in a future post. And to be clear about the doctrine, this isn't a magic-words game — written description never required the exact claim term. The question is whether the disclosure, in some form (text, an equivalent description, or a drawing), conveys possession of comparing one stroke's rotational values against a previous stroke's. Theirs conveys it in no form at all — recall: no “previous,” no equivalent term, no figure, just an unrelated “baseline” about vibration. You can't show possession, in writing, of a concept your written description never conveys. (The prosecution-side name for the same sin is “new matter” under § 132 — bolting onto the record something the original filing didn't support; in a PGR the ground actually pled is the § 112(a) written-description failure.) Critically, it's judged on their disclosure alone — what I did or didn't disclose has nothing to do with it; their claim simply isn't supported by their spec.

Two, and separately: to the extent that limitation means anything, I (and Fyfe) already disclosed the same comparison — that's the § 102/§ 103 lane, judged on either of these disclosures.

And so: their claim is unsupported by their own spec, and, independently, it isn't new. Either one sinks it; don't let me smush them together.

And don't lose sight of which limitation this is. “Previous stroke” isn't some incidental bit of wording — it's the one phrase the applicant added at the RCE that finally made claim 13 look different from everything before it, the hook the examiner hung the allowance on. Knock it out — as unsupported under § 112(a), or as already disclosed under § 102 — and there's nothing left holding the claim up. This isn't a peripheral defect; it's the load-bearing wall.

Equivalent terminology

You all know I'm not a lawyer, so preface this section (and this whole site) with that.

I don't even have a problem with claiming equivalent terminology. Like if the specification said "an earlier stroke" or something more complicated. But the specification completely lacks this notion of a "previous stroke." That's a bridge too far. Check their specification and tell me I'm wrong.

If you want to add terminology, you should at least argue the equivalence of that terminology in the prosecution. Say "this term means that." But they didn't even do that.

Hail Mary

I suspect this "previous stroke" argument was a Hail Mary aimed at the examiner, and it worked better than anyone should have expected (that's not good for the integrity of the examination process). Sneaking in material like this isn't cool. A lot of what transpired here isn't cool.^† They just claim I don't say it — which, in my reading of my own disclosure, is false… I clearly do. Even if I didn't disclose it, that doesn't mean they get to claim it — remember, they don't disclose it. Maybe you can shed some light on it?

† That's my read of the prosecution, not a finding of intent — I can't see inside anyone's head, and (as above) I'm not alleging, and the PGR does not allege, inequitable conduct or any breach of the duty of candor. My narrow point is that “previous stroke” isn't in the specification, so it shouldn't have been claimed or accepted. ↩

Wrapping it up

They did not disclose comparing the rotational values with previously sensed rotational values detected by the rotation sensor subsystem during a previous stroke. You'll just have to believe me, but you can read their specification to double-check (if you find it, please tell me).

Recapping

[Their claim 13]
… comparing the rotational values with previously sensed rotational values detected by the rotation sensor subsystem during a previous stroke of the downhole pumping system to determine if rotation of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system has occurred.

That's not in the disclosure. It's not even argued that it could be interpreted from the disclosure. The argument is that I didn't say it explicitly, so they should get to claim it. That's the argument.

I have a lot of problems with Claim 13. The new material isn't even at the top of that list, but it is very easy to comprehend, just like what I see as plagiarism. These aren't innocent careless mistakes (at least not in my opinion).^*

* That's my opinion, drawn from the public record — not a legal finding. I can't see inside anyone's head, so I'm not claiming, and the PGR does not allege, inequitable conduct or any breach of the duty of candor; my point is only that, to me, the record reads as more than simple oversight. “Plagiarism” is likewise my plain-English read of the side-by-side text, not a legal conclusion. ↩

Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — where I laid out the prior art in detail.
Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again — Claim 13 had new material not in the disclosure. Not established in the record.
Dispatch No. 17 — Let's Ask Claude — where Claude untangled the contradiction in the record.
Dispatch No. 19 — Bounding to a single stroke — bounding the sampling to a single stroke.
Dispatch No. 21 — § 101 — What Even Counts as an Invention — the next dispatch, reading this same "previous stroke" claim through § 101.
Dispatch No. 22 — § 102 — Nothing New Here — the § 102 anticipation leg: to the extent "previous stroke" means anything, I already disclosed it.
Dispatch No. 23 — § 103 — Obvious to Anyone in the Field — the § 103 obviousness leg of the same run through the statutes.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — the written-description / new-matter problem framed as the § 112 case.
Dispatch No. 26 — TL;DR; All the system failures — this new-material defect, gathered with every other examination failure.

Bounding to a single stroke

2026-06-08T12:00:00Z

A dyno card — the shape of a single stroke. Naturally bounded by those direction changes. I teach classes on this.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies rotation-sensing I disclosed first. This one takes on the “novelty” the patent leans on — bounding the sampling to a single stroke — which I'd already disclosed (it's inherent in the stroke). New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

Literally everything we do is tied to a stroke

Day one as a POSITA, you learn about the plot in the picture above. See how it loops around. We call that a dyno card. It gives us a view of how the pump is performing over a single stroke. That's important because the strokes repeat, so if you can look at one clearly, you can tell something. This concept is so fundamental, companies have put cheat sheets on mouse pads for tradeshow giveaways. Doing something during a stroke is the most common and obvious thing. There are lots of ways to dice up that continuous data stream into a stroke.

Bounding to a single stroke

A dyno card: one full stroke, bounded by its own direction changes.

OK, so you're thinking: but maybe they really did add something novel. The specific change in direction bounds something and does a more specific task. That's what the patent system is for. To build on previous technology. The problem with these sorts of "we painted it orange" patents is they devalue the original patent. It's not even a genuine design-around patent. This is just wordsmithing.

A workaround is valid… This isn't a workaround

OK, let's say they added some feature. If it's non-trivial, cool… but if it's trivial like "we painted it orange" that's a problem. I think I've made the case that this patent's sole purpose was to water down my claim to my exclusive rights as an inventor. If you read their disclosure, ask yourself: did they contribute anything to the collective knowledge and understanding of technology in the field? Something that wasn't already there (i.e. in the prior art)?

Heck, you could argue my application was a "paint it blue" on the earlier switch-based approach. My examiner argued that… at great length. I did non-trivial innovation by applying inertial sensors to sense this in a completely new and self-contained way. Multiple different ways, in fact. I thoroughly disclosed it. I should get the benefit of that Constitutional bargain. Article I, Section 8, Clause 8.

I didn't say I only detect rotation on days that end in "y", but apparently you could claim everything plus that and get issued a perfectly valid patent. That's effectively what happened here.

How many ways can you state the same thing?

I'll get to the § 102 standard (which was misrepresented) in a future post. For now, just believe me when I say a stroke means a well-known thing. Cutting up a continuous motion into distinct, repeating sections is also well known.

Detecting rotational torque — More specific

Remember, my disclosure was very thorough. There was a lot to disclose. Heck, I even had another way to determine rotation from RF signal strength (like watching the bars on your cellphone). That, in my view, got copied too — just like this, but by a different company. That just happened about a year ago. I haven't even gotten into that story yet.

I also had a section on detecting rotational torque buildup. This one is critical to the whole during a stroke thing. Remember, I talk about "over a stroke" 20 times. Multiple ways, multiple paragraphs. It bears more than a fleeting dismissal from the examiner.

The bulk of my disclosure revolves around detecting if the thing is even rotating at all, and for that alone you don't need to parse the individual stroke. But there are reasons to parse out the stroke.

I could go off into the weeds again, but I'll just provide a very specific example from my disclosure.

Intra-stroke… within a stroke

My degree is in Computer science (remember Dispatch No. 3?). I'll freely admit, I'm dragging in a term that is not-so-common to the rod pumping world. It is in the automation world, though, so a POSITA (with both rod pump and automation experience, which is common) would understand. If you asked, "what is meant by this?", they'd probably scratch their head and 5 seconds later they'd say: "Oh, I get it, that's within a single stroke… we do that all the time."

Here's the analogy: Internet vs. Intranet. Inter is between. Intra is within. Or maybe a patent example: Inter Partes Review (IPR). Inter here is between. But Intra-stroke… That means within the stroke, which means you have to bound the stroke. You can't not bound the stroke to get data within that stroke!

I say "Intra-stroke" 6 times. That means "within the bounds of a stroke"… 6 times! Heck, it's even in a claim. Here's that line from my claim 15:

[my claim 15]
the processor is configured to receive signals from the sensor indicative of instantaneous rotational deflection of the bridle assembly during stroking, and process those signals to detect intra-stroke torsional deflection over time, indicating a buildup of torque in the rod-string.

That's exactly what they are claiming. Looking at the rotational deflection within the bounds of a single stroke. I'm further clarifying here that this changes over time. They make it seem like you can just do it once… which you can, but that's useless information for the sake of detecting any change if it's not repeated. Think about a fire alarm that only ever checks if there is a fire once, and never again. It's an ongoing process.

Here's why it's confusing: It's bounding to a single stroke for one part (sensing something "right now"), but it's also doing this over subsequent strokes because it's useless to just know what something is doing right now… only once… never again, when you are looking for a change of state. You have to keep checking that thing. You don't have to constantly check it, but you need to do it periodically (i.e. start and stop the sensing because you care about saving battery life). I'll get to my Figure 6 in the next post, but I drew that as a looping flow chart to illustrate this exact concept.

And notice what this lands on. The one limitation their allowed claim leans on to look new is comparing this stroke's rotational values against a previous stroke's. That puts them in a vise. Either comparing across strokes over time is already here in my disclosure — it is; that's the “ongoing process” I just described, and my looping Figure 6 — in which case it's anticipated; or it wasn't in their own original disclosure and they bolted it on later, in which case it's new matter they were never entitled to (the subject of the next dispatch). Anticipated or new matter — it can't be the thing that saves the claim either way. (These are pleaded in the alternative, not stacked — the Board only has to land on one; I'm not trying to bank both on the same limitation.)

And I further constrained this to a secondary phenomenon of torque buildup so they ended up with a broader claim for something I claimed more specifically. That's crazy, isn't it?

Directional reversals

Stick with me here because I'm going to show you exactly where I disclose this, and it's one of those Oxford comma deals.

From my application/patent:

[0081] … After calibration, a three-axis magnetometer can determine direction, or compass heading, of [sic - oops, I make typos too] polished rod within the magnetic field.

Did that mean direction plus heading or direction, a.k.a. heading? The examiner ignored it. But at the very least, the wording is too on-point for the examiner to have skipped citing it in an Office Action. This reads directly on their argument.

And before anyone throws Dispatch No. 18 back at me — yes, over there I argue their “change of direction” is indefinite, and here I'm reading my own “direction, or compass heading” nice and broad. That's not having it both ways. A claim has to be definite — that's the whole notice function of § 112(b). A specification is supposed to be expansive: it can describe several things, several ways, and that breadth is a feature, not a defect. Disclosure breadth is the point; claim ambiguity is the problem. Different documents, different jobs. And the asymmetry runs this way for a doctrinal reason, not a convenient one: a piece of prior art counts against a later patent for everything it actually teaches a person of ordinary skill — every embodiment, every alternative it spells out and enables. A broad, many-ways disclosure like mine is therefore more anticipating, not less — each thing it genuinely teaches is separately available as prior art (each still has to line up with the claim the way Net MoneyIN requires, which I take up below). The very breadth that would be a problem if I were trying to claim it is exactly what makes it deadly as prior art.

The very next paragraph (again my application/patent) says:

[0082] The sensor may further comprise an accelerometer, a gyroscope or a barometer. An accelerometer can be used to detect the accelerations imparted by the directional reversals caused by stroking action. A 3-axis gyroscope is similar to a 3-axis accelerometer, except the frame of reference is a static inertial frame. A barometer can measure changing air pressure indicating the rise and fall of the sensing device. These sensors aid in identifying vertical, cyclic motion of the polished rod 101, and thus indicate that the pumping unit is stroking and rotation is accordingly expected. The magnetometer experiences a range of field distortions as the sensor moves closer and further from steel objects in the pumping system. Short term variation in the magnetometer readings can therefore also be indicative of stroking action.

Again, for F&*%$ sake, it's right there in black and white in my application! Read this, coupled with the intra-stroke disclosure above, and tell me it's not exactly what they are claiming in the whole 3 directional reversals thing? Or just look at Figure 8; that shows it all in a glance.

One lawyerly caveat, so I'm not overselling it: for a § 102 anticipation it isn't enough that every piece shows up somewhere in my disclosure — the pieces have to be arranged the way the claim arranges them (that's the rule from Net MoneyIN). I think they plainly are, and I'll walk that arrangement element-by-element when I get to the § 102 case. For now I'm just establishing that the raw materials are all here, in a single reference, in black and white — the arrangement argument is a short step from there.

Dispatch No. 3 — A Man Who Is His Own Lawyer Has a Fool for a Client — going it alone, pro se, against a corporate applicant.
Dispatch No. 13 — You Still Don't Believe Me About the Direction Change Thing? — the "direction change" / stroke argument.
Dispatch No. 18 — Indefinite and Unenabled — the § 112 indefiniteness and enablement case.
Dispatch No. 20 — New material, not in the disclosure — the undisclosed "previous stroke" material that builds on this single-stroke bounding.

Indefinite and Unenabled

2026-06-07T12:00:00Z

Two patent applications. Only one tells you how to build it.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review series on U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies rotation-sensing I disclosed first. The patent claims detecting a “change of direction” from a magnetometer signal. This one is the § 112 case: the term is indefinite and the disclosure never teaches how to do it. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

§ 112 — Enablement

This is why a Post Grant Review is important. I get to point out that the written description is wholly inadequate. That alone should have sunk this application and the examiner never applied it. Only § 102 and § 103 objections (and not very well on those).

As far as I can tell, the PGR and its ~$60,000 price tag are the only avenue for challenging a document that just doesn't teach what is claimed — i.e., § 112. This is an utter failure of examination.

And that's not loose talk — it's structural. The cheaper post-grant tool, an inter partes review (IPR), is by statute limited to § 102 and § 103 grounds based on patents and printed publications. You literally cannot raise § 112 — enablement, written description, indefiniteness — in an IPR. A PGR is the only post-grant proceeding where this ground is even on the table, and its window is just nine months from issuance. Miss it, and the most fundamental defect in this patent becomes effectively unchallengeable short of a lawsuit.

It's worth going back to read Dispatch No. 13 for this one.

§ 112(b)

Let's start with § 112(b): indefiniteness. The whole claim turns on (as the attorneys say… I'd say "rotates on") a “change of direction,” but it never says which kind of direction — the rod reversing its linear travel, or its rotational orientation? A magnetometer is a 3-axis sensor; it can act as a compass, so the “direction” it natively reports, as it would commonly be used (without a substantial explanation of how it's sensing something else), is rotational. In other words, a change in the direction it's pointing relative to the earth's magnetic field.

Before you say "oh, but they are clearly talking about axial direction", know this: the physical assembly also twists at/near the ends of stroke, so there are two types of direction changes happening at the same time… in the same place… exactly where they claim to detect a change in direction. That the rotation occurs at the end of stroke? That the signal changes with proximity to something? I can ask many questions to illustrate how little they disclosed about this.

That's something a POSITA would be needed for. Or you could just read my disclosure where I actually talk about all of this. And here's the problem with their disclosure. You can't tell what the heck they are sensing or how, or if they are processing the signal for something. It's just a magic conclusion that a magnetometer somehow senses some sort of direction change and that's somehow related to a sinusoid.

Fig. 8 — field lines through the stroke.

Note: the applicant mischaracterized my disclosure by calling attention to the description of the magnetometer acting as a compass. As you can see in my Figure 8 (in Dispatch No. 13), I talk about how it can also be used to determine linear position. Position can be further determined over time in terms of a velocity, or phrased as a direction change if you want to get pedantic. Position, velocity, and acceleration are all mathematically related. It's high school math, well within the purview of a POSITA. Again, this is all in my prior art description that I submitted to the examiner. Credit where credit is due: the examiner did point this out… once. Then apparently forgot. The examiner forgot a lot during this back and forth with the applicant.

Yet this same claim (their claim 7) is sampling the rod's rotational velocity. So when it says the sampling begins at a first change of direction, a second, and ceases at a third change of direction, does that mean the rod is reversing its linear travel — the top and bottom of a pump stroke — or its rotational direction? Those are two completely different things to sense, and they may occur simultaneously or close to simultaneously. Nothing in the claim — or in the disclosure — tells a POSITA which one is meant. A claim a skilled reader can't resolve with reasonable certainty is indefinite. That's not a nitpick; that's § 112(b).

These grounds run in the alternative, and the applicant shouldn't get to escape both ends at once. Unless of course the examiner ignores all of this.

Either “change of direction” is definite enough for a POSITA to pin down — in which case it just means the ordinary stroke boundary, the very thing the prior art (my own disclosure, and Fyfe) already taught. They even admit this in the original claim 7 by saying a stroke is bound by those direction changes, which is common knowledge. In that case the claim falls for anticipation under § 102 — or it genuinely is ambiguous between a linear and a rotational reading, and it's indefinite under § 112(b). Definite-and-anticipated, or novel-and-unintelligible. They don't get to have it both ways, and neither version survives a proper examination or review. I'll make the full § 102 anticipation case in a later dispatch; I'm trying to stick to § 112 here.

Full disclosure on my own argument: indefiniteness is the position I lead with on “direction change” — a serious, independent ground, not a throwaway. A determined defender will say the claim's own structure — a separate “axial motion sensor” and “rotation sensor,” with the direction changes bounding a stroke (which is an axial thing) — resolves the ambiguity with “reasonable certainty.” But that's exactly the trap from the paragraph above: the moment they say it's that definite, “direction change” just means the ordinary axial stroke boundary — the very thing my own disclosure and Fyfe already taught — and the claim falls for anticipation instead. Definite-and-anticipated, or ambiguous-and-indefinite; they don't get to have it both ways. And sitting on top of that is a second, independent failure that doesn't depend on the construction fight at all: even if “change of direction” were perfectly definite, the disclosure still never teaches how to do what's claimed. That's § 112(a).

§ 112(a)

And even if you decide “change of direction” is clear enough and referring to the linear direction, § 112(a) is the next problem. Written description asks whether their specification actually shows they possessed this — a real way to find that change of direction and sample around it — or whether they just grafted the words onto a disclosure that never describes the method.

Remember how this claim came back from the dead? Starting and stopping one type of sensing at a change in another type of sensing. Ooooh, that seems novel, right?

The key is equating what a magnetometer senses to a notion of movement or direction. A magnetometer doesn't provide that information directly. You can determine that from a magnetometer, but it's not a direct output. Sort of like how you can get position out of an accelerometer, but you have to apply some algorithm and understanding to get there. It's not just a magic box.

Enablement asks them to teach how to do it across the whole scope they claimed — and the Supreme Court drove this home in Amgen v. Sanofi (2023): the broader the claim, the more the specification must enable, across its full breadth. So if “change of direction” covers both the linear and the rotational reading, they have to enable both — from magnetic data that's inherently noisy, drifting in direction and magnitude along the entire path, and needing calibration and analysis to mean anything (I get into just how chaotic that environment is, with Figure 8, back in Dispatch No. 13).

And there is the fact that both "direction" signals are present in the magnetic field: linear direction change (which technically isn't correct, but I'll run with that for this) and rotational direction change.

That's the bar their spec has to clear. What the heck are you doing to pull out some actionable information from the magnetic field? Yes, it can be done, but they do not provide anything on the "how". It doesn't clear that bar: it merely recites the result and skips the how.

Whether I taught the how is a different question — that's my § 102 argument, not this one. For § 112(a), all that matters is that their disclosure doesn't. And the examiner should have seen this.

Dispatch No. 13 — You Still Don't Believe Me About the Direction Change Thing? — the direction-change argument and Claim 7 this builds on.
Dispatch No. 19 — Bounding to a single stroke — bounding the sampling to a single stroke.
Dispatch No. 21 — § 101 — What Even Counts as an Invention — why the unenabled "leap" is really this § 112 problem, not § 101.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — the § 112 ground laid out in the context of the PGR.

Let's Ask Claude

2026-06-06T12:00:00Z

Asking the planet-sized computer the big question — the answer, naturally, is 42.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review series on U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies rotation-sensing I disclosed first. This one is an experiment: I fed the entire prosecution history to an AI and asked it to find the examiner errors and candor problems I've been documenting since Dispatch No. 1 — then checked its work.

The short version

In Dispatch No. 16 I showed the very obvious typo (or worse?) that resulted in a deeply flawed allowance.

Let's see if we can uncover any other errors.

This is a long, boring one… But it uncovers some very interesting structural flaws in the patent system. These are things that are currently being exploited, and you won't realize what's happening until it's too late (it's already too late). It's not even what happened to me. This post is more of a cautionary tale, wrapped up in a bunch of armchair analysis (you all know I am not qualified to comment on any of this, so feel free to set me straight).

One important caveat before we dig in, and it's the same point I made back in Dispatch No. 2: an examiner's mistakes — even glaring, self-contradicting ones — are not themselves grounds to cancel a patent. A PGR stands or falls on §§ 101/102/103/112, not on “the examiner was sloppy.” So read most of what's below as context — how a bad claim slipped through, and how much benefit of the doubt anyone's earned — rather than the legal case itself. That said, one of these findings doubles as real evidence on the merits, and I'll flag it when we get there.

The prompt

Review the USPTO prosecution-history PDFs (in the current folder. see the First Office Action, Applicant response, Final Rejection, Applicant RCE response with amended claims, and Notice of Allowance). Analyze the examiner's office actions for technical errors or unresolved contradictions under the MPEP or statute without assuming any knowledge of the prior art's actual contents. Pay particular attention to internal contradictions in the record—especially whether a limitation the examiner relied on to allow a claim was earlier found anticipated by the same reference, and whether the stated reasons for allowance actually match the text of the claims they allow. Also carefully compare the applicant's remarks against the true text of the amended claims to flag any typos or misleading statements in the amendment and remarks.
Flag argument remarks that assert factual statements (not opinions) characterising the prior art.
Limit output to 2 sentences per finding, citing relevant MPEP or statutes.
Doublecheck your analysis.

These files are in downloads.

What Claude found

Remember this Notice of Allowance was July 2025. Claude Opus 4.1 was released August 5, 2025. It's hard to find old models still active. I objectively cheated here by using Opus 4.8.

Output:

Interleaved with my commentary

A. Dispositive contradiction: a limitation relied on for allowance was twice held anticipated by the same reference

[Claude Output]
A-1 — The sole stated reason for allowance is a limitation the examiner had already found anticipated by Phillips.

The Notice of Allowance allows "Claim 1 and all of it[s] dependencies" because "Puwanto, along with all other references, fail to teach continuing sampling the rotational values through a second direction change … and ceasing sampling the rotational values at a third direction change" (NOA p.5), yet both the non-final action (p.5) and the Final Rejection (p.6) expressly held that exact limitation — former claim 7's "continuing through a second change of direction … and ceasing at a third change of direction" — "Phillips further teaches," citing Phillips ¶¶[0029],[0110]. A reference cannot simultaneously anticipate a limitation and "fail to teach" it, so the reasons for allowance are irreconcilable with the rejections of record (35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1); MPEP 2131; MPEP 1302.14).

The examiner read my application (but probably only once). Here's the first OA:

[First OA, page 5-6]
Regarding Claim 7, Phillips further teaches the sensor system of claim 5, wherein the processor subsystem is configured to continue sampling the rotational velocity along substantially an entire stroke of the at least one rod, the sampling beginning at a first change of direction of the at least one rod, continuing through a second change of direction of the at least one rod, and ceasing at a third change of direction of the at least one rod [0029; 0110].

I'd have cited different paragraphs (there's a lot more content in my application), but still. Right there. The examiner stated that I teach that exact thing that claim 7 states (which is correct, I do teach that).

Then again in the Final OA/Rejection

[Final OA, page 6]
Regarding Claim 7, Phillips further teaches the sensor system of claim 5, wherein the processor subsystem is configured to continue sampling the rotational velocity along substantially an entire stroke of the at least one rod, the sampling beginning at a first change of direction of the at least one rod, continuing through a second change of direction of the at least one rod, and ceasing at a third change of direction of the at least one rod [0029; 0110].

This was cut and pasted from the First OA, but it was a second assertion on the very same fact. You have to count this as twice. It was still a § 102 when maybe it should have been a § 103… but cutting and pasting is way easier. Also, there was an examiner error in this same section by stating rejected claims 13-15, but then citing 19-20 (see Finding B-3 below). The examiner was clearly confused about claim 13 all the way back to the Final.

[Claude Output]
A-2 — The relocation that produced the contradiction is documented in the amendment markup.

The RCE listing strikes that entire "first/second/third change of direction" clause from claim 7 and adds a reworded version into independent claim 1 (RCE claims: claim 7 struck-through; claim 1 newly-underlined) — i.e., the precise text earlier mapped to Phillips ¶¶[0029],[0110] became the basis for allowance, unchanged in substance ("rod"→"component," "velocity"→"values"). The contradiction is sharpened because the same NOA cites Phillips "[0026; 0029; 0043; 0096; 0134; 0138; Fig. 6]" for claim 1's rotational sampling while declaring no reference teaches the second/third-direction-change sampling that ¶[0029] had been cited to anticipate (MPEP 1302.14; MPEP 2131).

I'd disagree with Claude here on ("rod"→"component," "velocity"→"values"): those are significant broadenings of the terms. But it's right on the text of claim 7 being twice previously found unpatentable by the examiner (under §102 but sadly not §103). It'd be different if the examiner indicated that was allowable, but that wasn't the case, twice prior. And using the same paragraphs twice to say I disclose it, then those same paragraphs again to say I don't, with no unwinding explanation?

[0110] … The magnitude of the rotational acceleration, velocity, and finally displacement can be measured through the use of an accelerometer and a gyroscope over a single stroke. These measurements, in turn, can be compared over many strokes to establish a torque buildup and release period and magnitude.

I'm talking about a very specific type of rotation here. The crux is whether I specifically use the magnetometer to bound the stroke. The short answer is there are many ways to bound the stroke. The answer in this context is paragraph [0082] (see below) where I talk about the different ways to bound the stroke, which includes the magnetometer as one option. This doesn't have to be a core element, it just has to be in there, and it very clearly is. Just in a paragraph that the examiner apparently didn't get to.

My [0029] was cited, but I'd have used my [0082]. Here's what those paragraphs state (note, [0082] is a much stronger text in this context):

[My disclosure]
[0081] The sensing device 201 comprises a sensor. For example, the sensor may be a magnetometer that senses magnetic field. Magnetometers operate by reading the strength of a magnetic field in a given direction. The magnetometer is effectively a compass that identifies a radial orientation of the polished rod relative to a fixed external location such as magnetic north. In the present context, the magnetometer is used to detect a change in radial orientation of the polished rod. After calibration, a three-axis magnetometer can determine direction, or compass heading, of polished rod within the magnetic field.

[0082] The sensor may further comprise an accelerometer, a gyroscope or a barometer. An accelerometer can be used to detect the accelerations imparted by the directional reversals caused by stroking action. A 3-axis gyroscope is similar to a 3-axis accelerometer, except the frame of reference is a static inertial frame. A barometer can measure changing air pressure indicating the rise and fall of the sensing device. These sensors aid in identifying vertical, cyclic motion of the polished rod 101, and thus indicate that the pumping unit is stroking and rotation is accordingly expected. The magnetometer experiences a range of field distortions as the sensor moves closer and further from steel objects in the pumping system. Short term variation in the magnetometer readings can therefore also be indicative of stroking action.

That's it! The examiner said I teach this, then turned around and believed the applicant's claim that I never said this exact thing in this exact way — even though that same examiner had stated it was taught, twice. You're probably saying "oh, but you're calling out the accelerometer, not the magnetometer", but read the 2 paragraphs together. Read the last 2 sentences that I emphasized because that's super important!

And here's the flag I promised — the part that isn't just “the examiner got confused.” In his own words, twice, the examiner wrote that Phillips further teaches claim 7's first/second/third change-of-direction sampling, citing specific paragraphs. That's not my characterization; it's the examiner's official finding, on the record, that the prior art already teaches the very limitation later blessed as the sole reason for allowance. An examiner's own anticipation finding doesn't prove a § 102 case — the Board decides anticipation fresh, from Phillips's actual text, and that text is the evidence that does the work. But it's a powerful piece of the record: the Office, in its own words, twice mapped this very limitation onto Phillips. The contradiction embarrasses the allowance; the underlying admission helps arm the petition — the prior art itself does the rest.

B. Internal contradiction within the Final Rejection (vibration limitation)

[Claude Output]
B-1 — Claims 13–15 are listed as anticipated by Phillips and, in the same action, rejected as patentable over Phillips for a feature Phillips admittedly lacks.

The Final's §102 heading states "Claims 1-7 and 13-15 are rejected … as being anticipated by Phillips" (p.4), but the body rejects claims 13–15 under §103 over Phillips in view of Puwanto because "Phillips fails to teach a vibration sensor subsystem for monitoring vibration … in three axes" (pp.13–15). A claim cannot be both anticipated by a reference and separately rejected as obvious for an element that reference fails to teach (35 U.S.C. 102/103; MPEP 2131, 2143.03, 706.02).

Typo? No! (well, yes, but it's worse than a typo) On page 4 of the Final OA it rejects 13-15 under a §102, but in that section it talks about claims 19-20. So which is it? Later on page 12, it rejects claims 12-15 (which includes 13-15) under a §103.

For clarity, let's look at the First OA since they were largely cut and pasted. In this one 13-15 is squarely in a §102 (both header and body). In the Final OA, 13-15 (plus 12) was moved to a §103.

So now ask, what was the typo in the Final OA? The header or the body of the §102?

Fig. 3 — my three-axis sensor (301).

I can't let the vibration sensor thing go. The examiner was just wrong here. I also didn't give Claude the source document, but this is especially interesting because even assuming it to be true (which it isn't), Claude uncovered the technical contradiction. I hate harping on this, but I couldn't have more clearly provided this 3-axis vibration sensor in the disclosure. It's a poorly sketched figure, but straight to the point. I use this same figure to reference the accelerometer (by definition a vibration sensor), a gyro, which I repeatedly describe as sensing "rotational oscillations" (oscillations are vibrations). And you could easily argue the stroking motion of the system is a low-frequency vibration (that sounds like a stretch, but it really isn't). That means I'm using the magnetometer as a vibration sensor, also in three axes. And the barometer. Have you ever heard of a barometer being used as a vibration sensor? Yeah, that's exactly how I'm using it too (but that's only in one dimension).

[Claude Output]
B-2 — The §102 anticipation of independent claim 1 never addresses claim 1's vibration element.

As it stood at the Final, claim 1 recited "a vibration sensor subsystem for monitoring vibration … in three axes" (shown unmarked — i.e., pre-existing — in the later RCE listing per 37 CFR 1.121), yet the Final's claim-1 §102 mapping accounts only for the magnetometer, gyroscope, and processor and is silent on the vibration element the same action says Phillips lacks. An anticipation rejection must account for every claimed limitation; omitting one while elsewhere admitting the reference does not teach it is an internal defect (MPEP 2131; 35 U.S.C. 102(a)(1)).

I'm still annoyed about the whole vibration sensor thing, but this is interesting. Yet another indication of the examiner's lack of attention. Maybe "variations in the magnetic field" counts… but wait, isn't that sort of like a vibration sensor (yes and that's how I use the magnetometer in one aspect), but more importantly the element of the vibration sensor in claim 1 was addressed in neither the First OA nor the Final OA. That was addressed in claim 12, but not claim 1! That's except for acknowledging in claim 1 that the magnetometer can detect variations (if that's not the definition of vibration sensor, what is?)… and then the examiner goes on to contradict that in claim 12 by saying I don't teach a vibration sensor 🤯

[Claude Output]
B-3 — The §102 heading misidentifies the rejected claims (notice defect).

The Final's §102 heading lists "1-7 and 13-15," but the body actually rejects claims 19–20 under §102 (p.6–7, "Regarding Claim 19, Phillips teaches a method…") and moves 13–15 to §103 — the heading appears copied verbatim from the non-final action without updating. Applicant's own RCE remarks had to re-state the ground correctly as "Claims 1 through 7, 19, and 20," confirming the heading failed to give clear notice (35 U.S.C. 132(a); MPEP 707.07).

🍌🍌🍌Bananas!!!🍌🍌🍌 The examiner is making stupid mistakes. I didn't even catch this one. Thanks Claude. Yep, it's right there. The header doesn't match the text and vice versa. How is claim 13 so frickin' slippery? It's like the Teflon claim.

This really makes me wonder if the applicant caught this and compounded it by that "innocent typo." I don't think it was innocent, but proving that is hard. See Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again

C. Reasons for allowance vs. the actual allowed claim text

[Claude Output]
C-1 — The reasons for allowance do not match allowed claim 13.

The NOA allows claims 13–15 only by asserting claim 13 has "analogous, though not necessarily coextensive, features … for similar rationale" as claim 1 (p.5), but amended claim 13 contains neither the "second/third direction change" sampling limitation that is the stated reason for allowance nor (after the RCE struck them) the vibration/vibrational-baseline limitations — its only distinguishing feature is comparing "rotational values with previously sensed rotational values … during a previous stroke." Allowing claim 13 by reference to a limitation it does not recite leaves it without a supported, claim-matched basis for allowance (MPEP 1302.14).

This one is self-evident. See Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again. It is fascinating that Claude processed these sequentially (C-1 through D-2).

D. Applicant's remarks vs. the true text of the amended claims (typos / misleading statements)

[Claude Output]
D-1 — Wrong claim number in the §102 argument.

Under the heading "Claims 1 through 7," the RCE remarks argue "Phillips does not describe the sensor system of amended claim 13 including a processor subsystem to: detect axial movement … sensing a direction change …" (RCE Remarks p.1) — but those are claim 1's limitations, so "claim 13" is a mislabel for claim 1 (cf. amended claim 1; 37 CFR 1.111(b)).

See Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again. It's amazing how complex this was and how Claude was able to untangle it with just the raw documents.

[Claude Output]
D-2 — Mislabeled "independent" claim.

The RCE remarks assert Phillips/Hurst do not "describe each and every element of independent claim 18, as currently amended" (p.3), but claim 18 is dependent on claim 16; the next sentence (arguing "amended claim 16") shows "claim 18" should read claim 16 (37 CFR 1.111(b)).

The applicant RCE remarks

Ok, I'll call this a legitimate typo. Maybe. At least this is within the chain of dependency, unlike that whole Claim 13 thing.

[Claude Output]
D-3 — Mischaracterization of the Final Rejection.

The RCE remarks state "The Final Office Action points to various generic statements in Phillips" regarding strokes/sensing (p.2), whereas the Final made a specific anticipation finding mapping the first/second/third-change-of-direction sampling to Phillips ¶¶[0029],[0110] (p.6) — the characterization understates the record the applicant was traversing (MPEP 2145).

The RCE

You can see the applicant getting bolder and more assertive with the mischaracterizations. A line was crossed somewhere here, but I'm not qualified to identify where.

E. Argument remarks asserting factual statements about the prior art (flagged)

[Claude Output]
E-1 — Categorical factual assertions contradicted by the examiner's own findings.

The RCE remarks assert as fact: "there is no disclosure in Phillips that the sensing then continues during a second change in direction" and "no disclosure in Phillips of then ceasing the sensing once a third change in direction is detected" (p.2) — flat factual characterizations of the reference that are the exact opposite of the examiner's record findings (Phillips ¶¶[0029],[0110]); the examiner adopted them in the NOA without reconciling his contrary prior position (MPEP 2145; 1302.14).

This is what I'm talking about in Dispatch No. 12 where I, as the inventor and with the most to say and lose, am silenced on the sidelines. For F&*#$ sake, just read the prior art submission. That's all you need to find the citations. Of course the examiner is going to believe the applicant. It's a one-sided conversation.

[Claude Output]
E-2 — Other flagged factual characterizations of Phillips.

Non-opinion factual assertions about the reference include the non-final remarks' "Phillips … '[t]he magnetometer is effectively a compass that identifies a radial orientation …' ¶[0022]" and "As recognized in the Office Action, Phillips fails to teach a vibration sensor subsystem. Office Action, page 11" (M171 pp.2–3, the latter accurate to the non-final action p.11), plus the RCE remark "while Phillips discussed some comparison of values, Phillips does not disclose using the value detected during a previous stroke" (RCE Remarks p.5) — all assertions of fact about the reference's contents rather than argument (MPEP 2145 / 716.01(c)).

Claude likes to shorthand filenames — M171 pp.2–3 is the applicant response to the first OA and it's really on page 3.

As recognized in the Office Action, Phillips fails to teach a vibration sensor subsystem. Office Action, page 11

Claude doesn't even know this is incorrect, because I didn't provide the source document (i.e. my application). It's crazy how it caught this even if it was for an unrelated reason.

In my opinion, this is misleading advocacy of the sneakiest kind. Notice how carefully it's worded: the applicant doesn't assert the false thing outright — they quote the examiner saying it (“As recognized in the Office Action…”), so the falsehood rides in on the examiner's own authority while the applicant keeps clean hands and we all get it psychologically reinforced, wink, wink. That careful construction is exactly why I'd call it misleading rather than a flat-out lie — and again, all my opinion. I'm open to hearing yours.

F. Minor / drafting items the examiner did not address

[Claude Output]
F-1 — Double-introduced element (possible antecedent-basis / §112 issue).

Independent claim 1 recites "a vibration sensor subsystem … in three axes," and dependent claim 12 then says "further comprising a vibration sensor subsystem … in three axes over a vibrational baseline" (RCE claims, claims 1 & 12), redundantly introducing a second such subsystem rather than referencing the one in claim 1 (35 U.S.C. 112(b); MPEP 2173.05(e)).

I didn't catch this either, but it's a good one. Usually examiners are pretty good about catching antecedent basis issues. I wonder if this indicates more shenanigans. Maybe this is trivial, I don't know. But it's perfectly valid to challenge with a PGR — and not just as another “examiner slipped” gripe: a claim element with no proper antecedent basis is a genuine § 112(b) indefiniteness defect, an actual ground that folds straight into my § 112 case. (Is it worth the effort? Doing the right thing should not have a price tag. The examiner screwed this up; the Office should fix it.)

[Claude Output]
F-2 — Claim typo: claim 4 recites "a previous stoke" for "stroke" (RCE claims, claim 4).

Yep, this made it to the final patent. More typos. It's trivial… but let's look at claim 4 for a second:

[Amended claim & published patent]
4. The sensor system of claim 2, wherein the processor subsystem is configured to determine the direction change of the at least one rod to indicate that a previous stoke has been completed and that a new stroke is beginning.

That's exactly what the whole 3 direction changes thing actually means. It's self-defining. The point is you don't need much from the prior art to see that this is just naked wordsmithing.

[Claude Output]
F-3 — Non-final grouping: claims 19–20 were grouped under "§103 over Phillips in view of Fyfe," yet the body reasons them on Phillips alone with no application of Fyfe (non-final p.11–12) — an imprecise statutory basis later effectively conceded when the Final moved 19–20 to §102/Phillips.

This is where and how Fyfe disappeared! See Dispatch No. 4. If the examiner bothered to read Fyfe at the RCE (or my Third-Party Preissuance Submission) this would have panned out differently, or at least I like to think it would.

The contradictory argument

Examiner: Phillips anticipated this.

Applicant: But he didn't state that explicitly the same exact way we said it.

Examiner: Oh, ok.

Why this matters

AI capability and output quality have accelerated sharply over the last several months. The models available in July 2025 were mostly retired.

You guys have no idea how powerful these tools can be in the wrong hands. This story all happened before these tools became widely available. Now it's trivial for anyone to analyze, in depth, an examiner's entire prosecution history — to reverse-engineer what arguments a given examiner does and does not accept. Not whether the thing is actually patentable. Just what works on that particular person. That's not invention, and it's exactly the abuse I'm warning about: my story is about to get put on steroids for everyone else.

To be clear about my own side of this: I've used AI here only to read public documents I'm entitled to read — the file history, the prior art, the patent itself — and to help me put them into plain language. I have not profiled this examiner, and I'm not shaping arguments to anyone's psychology. My PGR stands or falls on the prior art and the law, full stop.

Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the earlier time this same idea was good enough to copy.
Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — the prior-art submission that should have stopped this.
Dispatch No. 12 — A Private Conversation, Held in Public — digging through the office actions, I found exactly how this happened.
Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again — the Claim 13 misrepresentation I'm asking about.
Dispatch No. 20 — New material, not in the disclosure — the undisclosed "previous stroke" material this analysis points to.

Claim 13 — Again

2026-06-05T12:00:00Z

Sneaking an overly broad Claim 13 past the examiner — "Sure it will, just watch."^†

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review series on U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies rotation-sensing I disclosed first. Earlier I showed the Notice of Allowance praised a Claim 13 that doesn't say what the examiner said it does. This one argues that wasn't a stray typo — the applicant's own remarks misrepresented Claim 13. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

Shenanigans!

I've scratched my head about this because it's so bonkers. At what point does a simple typo become something more devious? The fallout from this is substantial and disproportionate. I bear the cost, not the applicant who did this, not the examiner who didn't catch this. Me, the original inventor who had to watch as my IP was handed to someone else. I'm on the hook for everyone else's mistakes.

Like everything else in this story, there's no downside to the applicant. I don't think this was an innocent typo — though I can't prove intent, and I'm not claiming to read anyone's mind; all I can do is tell my side of the story.

Here's the first section of the applicant's RCE:

[Applicant RCE Remarks]
Claims 1 through 7

Applicant respectfully asserts that claims 1 through 7 are not anticipated by Phillips under 35 U.S.C. § 102(a)(1) at least because Phillips does not describe each and every element of independent claim 1, as currently amended.

In particular, Phillips does not describe the sensor system of amended claim 13 including a processor subsystem…

What the actual F#@%? Claim 13 when discussing 1 through 7?

The text following this is the actual amended claim 1 text, so you're going to call this a simple clerical error, right? What's an extra "3"? That's trivially a typo, you'd say. But the examiner allowed claim 13 thinking:

[Notice of Allowance]
Claim 13, 16 and 19 include analogous, though not necessarily coextensive, features in conjunction with Claim 1, an [sic] is, therefore, along with its dependencies, for similar rationale as disclosed above, allowed.

Even though claim 13 was very different from 1, 16, and 19. Way different. Different planet different.

And notice the examiner's own escape hatch in that sentence: “not necessarily coextensive.” That hedge is the tell. You only write “not necessarily coextensive” when you haven't actually checked whether the later independent claims carry the same limitations — you're waving them through “by analogy” to claim 1 and trusting they line up. Here, claim 13 didn't line up at all.

All of this is in the Notice of Allowance.

How did this happen?

It all makes sense now.

It's right there on page 1 of the applicant's RCE response. Claim 13 surely must have the same text because it's "quoted" (as claim 13). Is this an innocent typo or a calculated misdirection? Given what I read as plagiarism and other misleading statements, I'm inclined to believe the latter (again, just my humble opinion, not fact).

Check my math. Here are the applicant arguments/remarks (RCE). Claims 1 through 7 are not claim 13, right?

Here's the text of the claim amendments (RCE) in that same response. I'll show you the real claim 13 below. Note: claim 13 is correct in the amended claims… sort of.^†† But if you're lazy and don't read the documents past the first page, you'd probably rely on "what looked like claim 13" on page 1.

†† It was amended to remove the vibration sensor, see below. ↩

Also, Claim 7 got reworded and that never got reviewed.

How did the examiner not catch any of this?

No safeguards — no review

I've said it all along, the examiner should have caught this on both:

The merits
- The direction change argument was garbage and repeatedly taught in the prior art, and pointed to directly in my prior art submission, and was even repeatedly admitted by the examiner
- Starting and stopping on stroke boundaries is also garbage. I say practically that 20 times. A POSITA would agree. I'll come back to the technicalities of this in a future post
On the basic proofreading of the allowed claims… but also the applicant remarks
- Claim 13 was missed - it completely lacked the stated allowance text
- Claim 7 got reworded - no review in the record
- Claim 1 added the vibration sensor without appropriate markup
- I'm sure there's more, heck, the examiner made technical errors too

In general, claim 1's (all applications, not just this one) get the most attention. Subsequent independent claims get less attention. That shouldn't happen, but we all know that's the case. This applicant was banking on that.

Pro tip: Always stick the broadest claim in after claim 1.

This is why I think it's dastardly. See the remarks in the Request for Continued Examination (RCE) that "quotes" (in quotes) claim 13. It's got a "1" in it and looks like the text of claim 1… if you just glance at it… which I think we've established is the M.O. here. That nuance is easy to miss. Heck, I missed it until I sat down to write this stupid blog and pick apart the documents. I didn't even find it. Claude did. Is this a psychological typo? Am I back in conspiracy town? Again, typos are perfectly legal… right?

But this only explains how it happened, not why (I think it was intentional, but that's just my opinion), or why the examiner didn't catch the end result — a simple critical proofreading pass would have uncovered that. The typo analysis here is super detailed. You don't need the typos to see the flaw — just read the real claim 13 against the examiner's reason for allowance (it's at the top of this page).

Considering all of this, why was this so hastily allowed?

Just an innocent mistake?

They touched the text of claim 13 in the amended claims. You'll all say one of these must be a simple typo. On page 1, they clearly meant to quote claim 1 in the remarks because that's the actual text. It's just coincidental that it makes claim 13 look like claim 1. But here's the kicker: they also broadened the actual claim 13 in the process. In other words, they made claim 13 appear to read similarly to claim 1 (page 1 of the remarks), but also removed text from the real claim 13 at the same time. Text that the examiner previously said was allowable. That raises some questions.

A vibration sensor

In that amended claim 13, they specifically deleted one of the examiner's stated reasons for allowance. The one about the vibration sensor in 3 axes (remember my figure 3 from Dispatch No. 9?)

Here's the examiner's Notice of Allowance:

[Notice of Allowance]
Philips [sic] fails to teach a vibration sensor subsystem for monitoring vibration of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system in three axes;

Forget the fact that the examiner repeatedly missed my obvious Figure 3 (Figure 3… for a generic 3-axis sensor)^‡. And that an accelerometer, by definition, measures/samples vibration. And that I call out "oscillations" in reference to the gyro (oscillations is a synonym for vibration). Forget all that. The examiner stated that a "vibration sensor" … "in three axes" was a contingent element for allowance. But it already had been removed in the very claimset the examiner was actively reviewing under the RCE. There's no excuse for not proofreading that. Both documents were in hand. Believe me when I say my third-party submission wasn't given a fair and thorough reading. The allowed claims weren't even given a half read.

‡ That's one of those intentional nuances that make this even more disappointing. I'm bummed I didn't make this dispatch 13. ↩

The order is confusing here. The applicant removed the vibration sensor immediately before the examiner said that if they incorporated the vibration sensor, it would be allowable 🤯! There's nothing wrong with that. Nothing wrong with throwing it against the wall to see if it sticks. But the examiner had to have at least seen this much. It was an amended claim.

Remember, the examiner had used this flawed vibration sensor logic repeatedly in the previous office actions, so the applicant knew this was an important element to include. Who said "Never interrupt your enemy while he's making a mistake"? I'm not saying the examiner was the applicant's enemy exactly — quite the contrary — but the applicant sure didn't point out this mistake. They went even further by pulling that specific text out of claim 13. That was bold. I wouldn't have thought it would work. I would have been wrong.

Should they have fixed it?

I sure think so, especially since you can very clearly trace the allowance of claim 13 to that typo on page 1 of the applicant arguments/remarks (RCE), and the vibration sensor being slipped into claim 1 without the appropriate markup. Forget about the legalities… the right and honorable thing to do would be to fix it.

A $1,000 deposit, a $1,000,000 balance — and the examiner working the window.

Analogy time: Say someone erroneously deposited a million dollars in your bank account — would you say anything? What's the harm in just letting it sit there… Someone else made that mistake, right? Now, what if you had a hand in erroneously making that deposit? Say you put the decimal point in the wrong place. Who's responsible then? I know all these analogies are slightly off, but this is a good one. You might just let the $1,000,000 sit there and play dumb… hope no one notices. I'm not sure if that silence is technically legal, but let's just say it is. No downside, right? But what if that money came out of someone else's account… and what if the bank told that guy (whose account got drained) "we need $60k to check our math and see if we screwed up". That sucks. Especially since that guy had his account drained and has no money (obviously this is all a hypothetical and has no parallel with the whole patent story).

A direct, traceable line

The material error, the typo, directly led to an allowance based on claim text that, in my opinion, was misrepresented. Once the applicant got the allowance, they certainly would have realized "oh, we hit the jackpot — we got this crazy extra-broad claim and the examiner didn't catch it". Should they have done the right thing and fixed it? Again, to the running theme of "no downside," what's the harm in letting it slide through?

Once a patent is granted, it costs an arm and a leg to claw it back, and they aren't on the hook for it. Remember, I believe the whole point of this was to stifle my ability to get a fair license from that same company (again, my opinion). The claims don't matter in that context. A wildly broad claim is just icing on the cake. Any rotation sensing patent involving a magnetometer, gyro, etc. would have been enough to muddy the waters. I can't say "they don't have a patent on that" anymore. There is confusion in the market. That harms me, but helps them. Again, no downside.

Either way, it falls on me financially to fix this. I have to pay for their mistakes and questionable ethics.

Full Claim 13 text (as amended)

[Their amended claims]
13. (Currently Amended) A sensor system for a downhole pumping system, comprising:

    a sensor subsystem for detecting movement of at least one component of the downhole pumping system, the sensor subsystem comprising:

    an axial motion sensor subsystem comprising an axial motion sensor, the axial motion sensor to be coupled to the at least one component of the downhole pumping system and to measure axial movement of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system based on variations detected by the axial motion sensor generated by movement of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system; and

    a rotation sensor subsystem comprising a rotational sensor, the rotational sensor to be coupled to the at least one component of the downhole pumping system and to detect rotational movement of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system by sampling rotational ~~velocity~~ values with the rotational sensor generated by rotation of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system; and

    👉👉👉~~a vibration sensor subsystem for monitoring vibration of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system in three axes; and~~👈👈👈

    a processor subsystem to receive data from the axial motion sensor subsystem and the rotation sensor subsystem, the processor subsystem to:

    ~~derive a vibrational baseline of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system from the vibration sensor subsystem in three axes during normal operation;~~

    verify the axial movement of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system with the axial motion sensor subsystem; [[and]]

    when the axial movement has been verified, ~~determine rotational velocity of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system with~~ detecting the rotational ~~velocity~~ values ~~detected by~~ with the rotation sensor subsystem during a current stroke of the downhole pumping system; and

    comparing the rotational values with previously sensed rotational values detected by the rotation sensor subsystem during a previous stroke of the downhole pumping system to determine if rotation of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system has occurred.

Direct link - Amended claims

See how they deleted the vibration sensor bit, broadening this claim.

Why this is worse than a mistake

I don't think any of this was a simple mistake. You can argue the contrary, but it's right there in the public documents. They amended claim 13 to remove an element the examiner previously held allowable — the vibration sensor (and in my opinion, that was done improperly on both ends). Then came what I read as a misrepresentation of that amendment (by number) in the argument, making it appear to have the elements the examiner would subsequently find allowable.

Here's where it lands in legal terms. Of everything on this site, this is the closest thing to textbook inequitable conduct — a breach of the duty of candor (37 CFR § 1.56) serious enough, in principle, to render a patent unenforceable. That doctrine (Therasense) demands two things: materiality and a specific intent to deceive. The materiality here is about as clean as it gets — you can trace a straight line from the mislabeled “claim 13” on page 1 to the allowance, so but-for that slip, this claim very plausibly never issues. The catch is the second element: intent lives inside someone's head, and I genuinely can't prove it. So I'll say only what I can stand behind — the materiality is there, the pattern is ugly, and the intent I can merely suspect. That's not me softening; it's me being precise about which half I can prove (the same calibration I laid out back in Dispatch No. 12). And the same boundary applies here, doubly so: inequitable conduct isn't something I can even raise in the PGR. The Board won't rule on unenforceability — that's a court question — so this Claim 13 story is context for how the bad claim slipped through, not a ground the petition stands on.

If all of this was truly a simple mistake, it had dire consequences, resulting in the allowance of claim 13. What would be the downside? "Oops, it's a mistake (but someone else will have to pay to get it fixed… not us, who made the mistake)". It's truly shocking how much harm can befall an innocent party (me, the original inventor) for the negligence of others.

The examiner's stated reasons for allowance were crystal clear (completely wrong in my opinion) — claim 13, as written, plainly didn't meet them. But if you get an unpatentable claim, who pays for fixing that? An issued claim rides on a statutory presumption of validity — it's treated as valid until someone else pays a bunch of money to prove otherwise, which is exactly what my PGR sets out to do. In the meantime there's no downside to the applicant for walking away with a claim broader than the allowance can support: the system effectively lets them bank the over-broad claim and dare anyone to challenge it. It's effectively "oops, we got a broader claim than we should have… ❝we didn't even realize❞ that's what happened… uh? sorry… I guess?"

Relevant documents:

Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — my third-party submission, including the figure they kept missing.
Dispatch No. 8 — Back From the Dead — how this application sprang back to life.
Dispatch No. 9 — The Overly Broad Claim Slipped Through — how claim 13 doesn't track with the examiner's reason for allowance.
Dispatch No. 11 — Suspicious Allowance Timing — the suspicious timing of that allowance.
Dispatch No. 12 — A Private Conversation, Held in Public — digging through the office actions, I found exactly how this happened.
Dispatch No. 14 — My Apology to Good Examiners — my apology to the good examiners, and what this applicant did.
Dispatch No. 17 — Let's Ask Claude — I put the whole thing to Claude.
Dispatch No. 20 — New material, not in the disclosure — the undisclosed "previous stroke" material this broadened Claim 13 introduced.
Dispatch No. 29 — Independence Day — the Independence Day coda, revisiting this claim-13 mess as part of the error-ridden examination.

Strapping Cell Phones to Oil Wells

2026-06-04T12:00:00Z

Strapping a phone to the rod rotator — and, against the odds, it worked.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, the patent I believe copies my work. This one is a breather and the origin story: how I built the rotation-sensing invention by strapping smartphones to pumping units — the disclosure everything else turns on. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

All of this dumping on examiners (see my apology in Dispatch No. 14) and complaining about the process has got me down. There was a time when I was out inventing stuff. That was fun. Here's that story.

The oil industry isn't all bad

Some of the first mobile computers, large-scale computing, heck the concept of wavelets… I could dork out for hours. The point is a lot of innovation comes from this field. A lot of patent decisions. A lot of good people (and some bad ones). And that scene in Landman really happened, but not at all like they portrayed it. Also, I'm trying to get my dog on that show… in case anyone has connections.

You don't have to like this industry to appreciate this story. Corporate ethics are a disaster in every industry.

If you really don't like this industry, then you can root for me extra hard.

The rest of this post describes the actual invention. I probably shouldn't have waited until the 15th post to explain the technical/physical problem this invention solves.

The oil well

A rod pump, top to bottom — note the crooked wellbore.

Every good invention solves a problem. But first you need to know a bit about how an oil well works. There are many other types of wells, but this is the one you all think of. The pumpjack, or rod pump.

That pump has 2 simple check valves and pushes the fluid from the bottom of the well up. Every stroke cycles those valves (that direction change is why I say everyone learns this on day one). Every stroke moves a little more fluid up and eventually it gets to the surface, then to a refinery, then to your gas tank. I'm happy to answer questions.

It's called a rod pump because that thing you see bobbing up and down is connected to a long rod. A wise man once said thin joints of steel bar that are threadedly connected through couplings. What that means is the thing at surface is connected to the pump way down at the bottom of the well by a rod string.

A cable saw — no teeth, but a lot of sideload.

It's called a rod string, because when a steel rod is that long it kind of feels like a floppy string. This rod string can be over 2 miles long, snaked through a crooked pipe. It's useful to think about those camping saws. That's a good analogy for the deeper problem here. That floppy string snaked through that crooked path sort of acts like this saw. It wears through the tubing by friction and abrasion — same basic concept as the saw. We want to distribute that abrasion to increase runtime.

The system

So now we have a long steel rod connected to a downhole pump at one end, and the pumpjack at surface. In a perfect world that's it, but in reality the wellbore is crooked. Every time this rod slides up and down (remember those direction changes), it rubs a little bit on the crooked part of the well. This happens 24/7, at 1-10 strokes per minute. That's upwards of a few million strokes per year. A few million scrapes and gouges wear through, which means failure, which means you need to pull all those rods out (and more), replace the worn ones, and run them all back in. It's an expensive failure.

To mitigate that wear, we slowly rotate the rods. On every stroke, the stroking action pulls up on a ratchet arm, actuating a slow gear. The goal is to evenly distribute the wear. But it turns very slowly.

The problem

Wear-related failures. The rod literally cuts its way through the tubing.

The rod rotator mechanism turns slowly, too slow to easily see and verify visually. If you're really determined, you can watch it for a while and verify it's working, but that's very subjective. It could go undiagnosed for a long time. Heck, a lazy field tech might just phone it in and not actually look at it… you know, like — in my opinion — a certain examiner and a certain document…

Not catching this can result in an early failure like this one. There are more nuanced failures that arise, but this one is obvious. The rods sawed themselves through the tubing. Remember, wells are crooked, creating a sideload, and that stroking action (defined by those pesky 3 direction changes) slides the rod against the tubing and friction/sideload/wear all cause various failures.

The fundamental problem this invention addresses is catching a failed rotation mechanism early.

The solution is either to rely on visual inspection (unreliable… just like a certain examiner), or to use automation to sense it.

Background - the first patent

The first rotation sensing system was by Hurst, patent 9,140,113. This was a wired switch-based system that had two fundamental problems (and some not-so-fundamental problems). First, it was a wired sensor — and wires are problematic in this system, since it's constantly moving (5,000,000 times a year) and outside in the elements. The second problem is that the switch-based system required converting the trigger counts to some actionable alarm. You can't just wire in the switch, you need some extra programming on the automation to provide a useful on/off signal for a failure. Or a range signal… but either way, a counter is difficult to generate an alarm from (not impossible, just hard… and "hard" doesn't make or break a patent… but not disclosing the hard part should raise examination objections).

The solution - my solution

I can build a better mousetrap. It's slowly rotating so I can use inertial sensors to sense it. Then I can provide a simple signal based on that state.

This is something completely new. This is an invention. This is something worthy of a patent.

The R & D

March 2017 — before the actual idea. It took 9 months to sort out the “it should be a patent” part.

This was the fun part. An idea is great, but seeing it come to life is something truly exciting. This is the kind of stuff I want to be doing. This is how we maintain our innovation edge. Imagine if there were more folks like me out there making cool things. But sadly, the enthusiasm has been squeezed out of me because the system failed to protect the very thing it was designed to protect. Me.

So here I was in March of 2017 armed only with a cellphone and a data logger app. Can I get actionable information from this? Can I sort through the chaotic nature of the system and its signal? It took 9 months for me to file my provisional. Remember, I didn't have a roadmap or a disclosure to literally copy to expedite that process. I had to do the hard part. The actual inventing. The (patent) system should have had my back. The examiner should have examined this. There were so many failures. As an inventor, I'm well used to failures.

(And the usual caveat: “the examiner should have examined this” is my grievance, not my legal argument. A PGR doesn't hinge on the examiner at all — the Board re-decides the patent on the prior art and §§ 102/103/112.)

The prototype

The concept: a self-contained sensor riding the rod rotator.

And here it is. That little red doohickey. Slick, compact, efficient, ready for production. (The part that made it actually work — taming that noisy magnetometer signal — is exactly the how the copycat's filing never discloses.) Then, the way I see it, I got ripped off. This is how close I was. I spent a bunch of time, effort, and money developing this with the (false) assumption that the USPTO would rigorously examine any other application that came along. It's their fundamental job. If they just did that, I wouldn't be in this mess. I might have even made some money from my hard work? Heck, who knows what other inventions I would have come up with in the meantime if I had the financial resources the USPTO delightfully passed to the non-innovative folks in this story.

I would much rather be inventing. I've had several ideas that I just gave up on because of what happened here. Why even bother? That's the tragic reality of this whole story. You all lose out on my innovation. I know that sounds awfully conceited, but think about it. I'm not coming up with some widget to improve some process or operation. Imagine if the dude who invented the lightbulb said, "Why even bother?"

Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the prior-art side-story from these same early field-testing days.
Dispatch No. 13 — You Still Don't Believe Me About the Direction Change Thing? — the direction-change argument. It should be obvious.
Dispatch No. 14 — My Apology to Good Examiners — my apology to the examiners who get it right.

My Apology to Good Examiners

2026-06-03T12:00:00Z

The examiners who do the job right: careful, honest work under hard conditions.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537. After a lot of hard words about one examiner, a clarification was due. This post is my apology to the good examiners. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

I pointed out in Dispatch No. 11 that I hope the good examiners would want to weed out the bad ones. I don't want to complain about this. I don't want to cast anyone in a bad light^† — that's not a good use of my time — and I don't feel good about that, even in the case of this one specific examiner. Patent examination is hard work. I hear tales of quotas and poor working conditions and honestly wonder how this doesn't happen more often. There are many good examiners who do very good work under terrible conditions. To those examiners, please accept my apologies for this blog. I am trying to demonstrate how those terrible working conditions lead to terrible errors and I sincerely hope this results in improved working conditions and resources.

† Any relation to actual individuals in this story is purely coincidental. I described my opinion of certain hypothetical actors to a machine, and it generated these images based on my opinions, not factual assertions of their character or physical appearance. ↩

My beef with this examiner

I should start with the apology, but I think I need to explain myself first. Why am I being so hard on this one examiner? First, it's actually 2 examiners — the primary examiner and supervisor. When there's a chain of command that screws up this bad, someone needs to speak up. My issue is that I did the work for the examiner. I mapped everything out. I'm annoyed that practically none of that made it into an office action. It's almost as if I offended the examiner into not doing their job out of spite (obviously my opinion).

Ok, even if you don't believe me about the merits. That's fine. Look at all the obvious and significant mistakes that were made by the examiner. If you had a job, and realized someone outside the organization was watching, would you do your job better or worse? I looked at some of the other examinations from this examiner's docket. It's hard for me to say this examination was "worse" than normal, but it sure feels like it.

So when you ask what my beef with this examiner is, keep in mind my issue is with both the quality of the work and the merits.

The good examiner

If a good examiner had reviewed this file, they would have realized the third-party prior art submission held everything they needed to handle this case. I put an awful lot of work into that and gained a new respect for the examination process along the way. Part of that is why I am so troubled by its utter lack of appearance in any office action. I practically did the whole job for the examiner. I'm confident that in the hands of just about anyone else, this would have been handled much better.

I should be clear about one thing, since this whole post is about examiners: a bad examination is not, by itself, a ground to cancel a patent. The PGR doesn't relitigate the examiner's job — the Board takes a fresh look at the claims on the prior art and §§ 102/103/112. The examiner is most of why this happened; the case is the prior art and their own disclosure.

I would like to sincerely apologize to all the good examiners out there. Thank you for your hard work.

Maybe it was a technical error?

I did have to file this third-party submission through EFS-Web in the last week of its existence because I had to pay the fee and Patent Center couldn't handle that yet. It was a weird time. I might have filed the last third-party submission through EFS-Web? It's possible.

Maybe then there was a technical issue and maybe somehow my actual description document didn't make it to the examiner? It was in the public-facing file, and the dedicated examiner who screens these submissions — before it ever reached the application's examiner — told me to remove the bit about the copied text (remember that from the backstory on the home page). I know, the document not being physically available to the examiner is a long shot (but it would explain everything). Still, this is my apology to the good examiners so I'm fishing for a reasonable explanation. Maybe this examiner was otherwise exceptional and just had a bad day (actually three days)? I don't know.

Also, I'm pretty sure this examiner never encountered a third-party submission, so that could explain the lack of attention it seems to have been given.

Claim 13

The examiner absolutely should have caught this (both on the merits and on a basic proofreading pass), but the applicant pulled a fast one. For this post, and in an apology to good examiners, I'll pull back my criticism slightly. I'm sure it's hard enough to do the job as-is, but when an applicant pulls shenanigans, it gives the examiner a bad rap. I could have helped point this out, but the system prevented that.

That misleading claim 13 typo is not the examiner's fault. That's the best I got… this should have been caught in a simple proofreading pass.

Quotas

Are there really quotas? Do examiners really have allowance numbers to meet? Even if it's just processing (production/disposal) quotas, that's a problem. If this applicant isn't going away, what's the fastest way to process that off the docket? That's a shame on the USPTO, although it makes sense in a Ponzi scheme sort of way. Those fees are the lifeblood of the Office — and the biggest stream, maintenance fees, flows only from patents that actually issue (an abandoned application pays nothing more; a granted patent keeps paying maintenance fees for years). So not allowing an application means no more fees. The structure perversely rewards allowance. That's a shame. Even Harvard realized (just this year) that handing out "A's" like participation trophies just reduces everyone's incentive. That's not an issue with the examiners, that's an issue with management. Like handing out A's where they aren't deserved, the value of our innovation (as individual inventors and as a country) is diminished. Everyone loses there.

Again, I am truly sorry

I apologize to the good examiners. This specific examiner and the supervisor can, as the Canadians say, take off, eh (that's me being polite, I'll offend someone if I say what I really want to say). But for the rest of the hardworking, diligent examiners, thank you.

Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the highly relevant prior art a careful examiner would have applied.
Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — the submission that was too detailed to wave through.
Dispatch No. 11 — Suspicious Allowance Timing — the suspicious allowance timing behind all this.
Dispatch No. 15 — Strapping Cell Phones to Oil Wells — the cell-phones-on-oil-wells story.
Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again — the applicant conduct that still doesn't excuse the carelessness.
Dispatch No. 21 — § 101 — What Even Counts as an Invention — the eligibility angle the examiner never reached; background commentary, not a PGR ground.
Dispatch No. 22 — § 102 — Nothing New Here — the anticipation ground the examiner raised twice and then dropped.
Dispatch No. 23 — § 103 — Obvious to Anyone in the Field — the obviousness ground the examiner never ran on the claim that mattered.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — the strongest ground, and the one the examiner never raised at all.

You Still Don't Believe Me About the Direction Change Thing?

2026-06-02T12:00:00Z

Into the weeds on Claim 7.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review series on U.S. Patent 12,460,537. The patent's “allowable” subject matter hinges on a claimed “change of direction”; I say that just restates the pump stroke I'd already described in my own disclosure. This one proves it from the applicant's own Claim 7. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

Remember, in Dispatch No. 8, I mentioned claim 7 because that formed the basis of the allowable material. Interestingly, it also makes a very pointed case that my whole “walking” analogy is accurate — that taking a step is the same as lifting your foot, moving it forward, setting it down. In other words, the applicant basically says they mean the same thing. It's right there in claim 7 and I'll get to this below. Claim 7 says that the stroke is defined by these direction changes.

Could you start taking a step with your foot off the ground? I suppose you could argue that, but does it make any sense? No, everyone knows what it means.

In Dispatch No. 9 I showed that the examiner allowed Claim 13 for reasons that point to a “first,” “second,” and “third” direction change — language Claim 13 simply does not contain. If you weren’t convinced, this one is for you.

What is a direction change anyway?

First, you have to know the motion of this system is mechanically bound. It's a common four-bar linkage problem. The thing goes up and goes down because rotary motion is transferred to linear motion. This concept is thousands of years old. I don't need to go into the weeds of this. Suffice it to say the direction change is a fundamental action that this thing does. That being said, the "direction change" isn't even very well defined in their disclosure. I'll get to this below.

Three direction changes

A pumpjack is a four-bar linkage — rotary crank motion converted into the up-and-down stroke.

What does this mean? You could write it a thousand different ways, all of which would probably convince at least one person it's somehow a novel process. "Return to the same starting position" … "Cross a zero velocity"… "when the sum of the displacement equals zero"… All sorts of convoluted phrases that fundamentally mean the exact same thing.

You could call it a "cycle"… I call it a "stroke" (and so does every other POSITA).

At least it was a new walk.

The whole "keep doing what you're doing" at a 2nd change seems like unnecessarily complicating the verbiage to make it sound fancier. This is why my walking analogy from Dispatch No. 8 is applicable. It's describing a thing we all know, but with extra words to make it sound like something more than it is. That thing is there by definition. You can't walk without lifting your foot… unless of course you're Michael Jackson. Too soon?

Let's get into the real arguments for why this direction change nonsense is flawed at a much deeper level.

Claim 7 — the direction change

Sorry, I need to write it out. This is the claim that was moved to claim 1 to magically make it novel.

The sensor system of claim 5, wherein the processor subsystem is configured to continue sampling the rotational velocity along substantially an entire stroke of the at least one rod, the sampling beginning at a first change of direction of the at least one rod, continuing through a second change of direction of the at least one rod, and ceasing at a third change of direction of the at least one rod.

I stated “over the course of a stroke” 20 times in my application (I guess you'll just have to trust me on that, but you can verify that statement). What this “course of a stroke” means to a POSITA is painfully obvious. But you don't have to believe me. The definition is right there in their claim 7.

[Their application, claim 7 above]
along substantially an entire stroke

They admitted it, right there

Can we just agree that this means “over the course of a stroke”?

And this isn't just me waving my hands — it's a claim-construction argument. The claims are the strongest evidence of what the claims mean, and a patentee gets to act as their own lexicographer; here the applicant's own claim 7 defines the stroke by spelling out its boundaries (“along substantially an entire stroke… first… second… third change of direction”). A patent lawyer will counter with claim differentiation — the idea that because “stroke” and the “first/second/third change of direction” appear in different claims, they must mean different things, so “stroke” alone can't already include them. Nice try, but that presumption is rebuttable, and claim 7 rebuts it on its face: it doesn't treat the direction changes as some extra feature bolted onto a stroke — it uses them to define the span of the stroke itself (begin at the first, continue through the second, cease at the third). That isn't two different scopes; it's the claim telling you what a stroke is. And the reason it can is physics: a stroke is its direction changes.

I don't specifically say along substantially an entire stroke, but I do say it a bunch of different ways: “during the stroke”, “single stroke”, “over the course of a stroke”, etc.

Heck, I even say "stroke-induced rotational deflection" which alone pretty much sums up (or rather rebuts) all of their arguments.

I also map out "how" you would sense this as you can see in my Figure 8. This one is so important I included it in the prior art submission "concise description". I also say this in my application. This is literally prior art that the examiner didn't use:

Fig. 8 — field lines through the stroke.

[My application]
It can be seen that the magnetic field observed by the sensor can be substantially different in both direction and magnitude depending on the location of the sensor along its path of travel. This can yield significantly erroneous readings if not properly addressed through calibration.

I drew a frickin' picture of what it looks like. That's important. To get a patent you (at least in theory) are supposed to teach the world how to do it. You can't just claim the conclusory results of something (yes, subject of a future post… again).

Relevant disclosure

Here's the relevant sentence from their disclosure. Their disclosure isn't very detailed, so this one is easy.

[Their application]
[0039] The sensor subsystem 204 may include an axial motion sensor subsystem 206 including one or more sensors for detecting linear movement (e.g., a magnetometer, a capacitive sensor, a Hall effect sensor, an optical sensor, etc.). For example, the axial motion sensor subsystem 206, which may be contained in the sensors 175, 185 may be coupled to one or more components (e.g., the polished rod 135) of the downhole pumping system 100 to detect axial movement of the polished rod 135 of the downhole pumping system 100. In embodiments where the axial motion sensor subsystem 206 includes a magnetometer, the axial motion of the polished rod 135 may be monitored based on variations in a magnetic field detected by the magnetometer generated by movement of the polished rod 135 of the downhole pumping system 100. For example, the magnetic field surrounding the polished rod 135 and the nearby metallic structures (e.g., the wellhead 125) may provide a sinusoidal-type waveform in the magnetometer that can be monitored to determine when the polished rod 135 changes axial (e.g., vertical) direction (e.g., during an up and down stroke of the polished rod 135).

I could go sentence-by-sentence and show where I disclose every single element. The only thing in this paragraph that I do not explicitly state is the bit about the sinusoidal-type waveform. I'm not exactly sure how that happens "in the magnetometer," but sure. Note: there's a § 101 angle in here too, but it's the least compelling of all of my issues with this application — background commentary, not a ground I'm raising in the PGR. Still, the examiner should have at least looked (future post… sorry I keep saying this).

It's complicated

The problem is that just watching a sine wave tells you nothing about a change in direction — only about the magnetic field. This could change because of rotation. It could happen in addition to linear proximity changes. There's moving steel all through this system, so the magnetometer also sees direction changes of other moving metal things, and those are indistinguishable from a direction change of the rod itself. You can't just magically make those go away.

The whole thing is very complicated and this single sentence does not even begin to enable that conclusory statement of "can be monitored to determine … changes … direction".

That is a § 112 problem — indefiniteness, written description, and enablement. That is a big one, so I'm giving it its own post.

I'll come back to the mischaracterizations too, because it's mind-boggling how they bamboozled the examiner. There's so much more to talk about here.

Super pedantic

OK, they start sampling at a change in direction… meaning they aren't sampling before that change in direction occurs… And "ceasing" sampling is not entirely accurate since this process necessarily repeats. So for it to technically work, you aren't ceasing, you're pausing… because you are going to repeat this process. I'm not hanging my hat on that argument either, but you can see the cracks starting.

Dispatch No. 8 — Back From the Dead — how this claim came back from the dead.
Dispatch No. 9 — The Overly Broad Claim Slipped Through — why the allowed Claim 13 doesn't contain the "direction change" language.
Dispatch No. 15 — Strapping Cell Phones to Oil Wells — those same direction changes, out on a real pumping unit.
Dispatch No. 18 — Indefinite and Unenabled — the § 112 case: indefinite and unenabled.
Dispatch No. 19 — Bounding to a single stroke — bounding the sampling to a single stroke.
Dispatch No. 21 — § 101 — What Even Counts as an Invention — the sinusoid / direction-change leap, seen through § 101.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — why that unenabled “leap” is the § 112 knockout.

A Private Conversation, Held in Public

2026-06-01T12:00:00Z

A two-party conversation, held in public: the examiner and the applicant, with the inventor left watching.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review series on U.S. Patent 12,460,537. Recall I filed prior art against the application but had no way to answer the applicant's attorney during examination. This one catalogs five statements in that record I'd call misleading — ones nobody was positioned to rebut. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

The short version

Examination is public — the whole file wrapper is right there for anyone to read, as it happens in real time. But it's a conversation between exactly two parties: the applicant and the examiner. Everyone else, including the person whose idea is on the table, gets to watch what I'd call the misleading statements pile up and can do nothing about it.

No public participation

Not an invitation for public participation.

Sure, I filed my third-party preissuance submission (see Dispatch No. 6), which I'm totally happy with. That's a good process. A separate examiner runs interference to prevent overloading the actual examiner. It's efficient and formal. It should have worked. The key arguments were there. The flaw is that the actual examiner, the one charged with the integrity and faith of the whole system, was under no obligation to actually read or understand it. No safety valve. No backup. No way to identify when things are going off the rails. That's a big flaw.

That's why I want the PGR. The system has shown itself untrustworthy when left to its own devices, when the only advocate you have abdicates their responsibilities. All the other lesser options tell me to sit back and shut up.

More issues with the process

With the third-party preissuance submission, there's also the timing issue. It is a narrow window when you can file one of these. You have no indication where the examination will go… what arguments will be relied on… what specifically should be pointed to in the prior art. I was well within the window. I covered a lot.

For F@#$ sake!

But I couldn't compel the examiner to actually read or comprehend it. The answer was buried in there. Remember, I was thorough — same as with my disclosure. It was comprehensive and "concise", but that doesn't mean short. There were a lot of claim elements to point to in the prior art.

Once I filed the third-party preissuance submission, I was done. I already said what I needed to say (within that time window), but the examiner was clearly ignoring it. All I wanted to say was, "read page 9 for F@#$ sake!" — it's right there!!! But I couldn't even do that.

That is incredibly frustrating. It's worse than not doing anything.

I can't say anything, but the applicant can. And no one was keeping them honest and accountable here. You can say an awful lot that can be claimed as truthful and honest, all while being, in my view, incredibly deceptive.

Misleading statements

Imagine going to court and after opening arguments, you can't say anything. The plaintiff can say whatever they want to the judge, but you have to just sit there and watch. They can twist your words, call attention to distracting passages and mischaracterize them. All the while, you can't say a thing. It's terribly unfair. Especially when I could (and already did) clarify every single point. But since the judge (i.e. the examiner) didn't care to read/re-read the documents, but instead listened to the plaintiff, of course they're going to rule in the plaintiff's favor.

One legal note before the examples, so we're all calibrated. Everything I'm about to call “misleading,” “deceptive,” or worse is my opinion, drawn entirely from the quoted public record — you're reading the very same sentences I am. Now the doctrine: everyone who prosecutes a patent owes the Office a duty of candor and good faith (37 CFR § 1.56). That's the rule these statements strain. But don't expect it to do dramatic work — the remedy for breaching it, having a patent held unenforceable for inequitable conduct, requires proving both that a misstatement was material (but-for it, the claim wouldn't have issued) and that there was a specific intent to deceive the examiner (Therasense). That's a deliberately steep bar, and I'm not formally alleging it. I'm showing you what the candor duty is meant to prevent, and letting you judge how close this came. And one more boundary, since it matters: candor and inequitable conduct are not PGR grounds. The Board decides this patent on §§ 101/102/103/112, not on whether the applicant played fair — unenforceability is a court question. So read this section as how the examiner got rolled, not as part of the invalidity case.

Example #1 — "does not appear to describe"

From the September 2024 response to the first office action — annoying, but plausibly deniable. I do in fact describe this, but what's the harm in saying I don't? Remember, no downside.

Phillips does not [emphasis theirs] appear to describe, however, that the magnetometer is used to “measure axial movement of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system based on variations in a magnetic field detected by the magnetometer” as recited in claim 1.

Fig. 8 — field lines through the stroke.

I dedicated a whole figure to just this. It was difficult to illustrate. I struggled with this figure because of how abstract and complicated this concept is, but the resulting figure is a pretty good representation. Axial movement is up and down along the stroking path. The field lines here illustrate unique field strengths at various elevations. Look, they kind of make a ladder. This is very complex because that environment is changing dynamically.

The point here is this is exactly how you measure axial position, and when that's done over time (as is the case here), that measures movement. And that in turn is the direction change — exactly what the whole "over the course of a stroke" (which I say 20 times) is pointing to. You shouldn't need to be a POSITA to comprehend this. It's basic. It's high school physics.

Note the emphasis on the term "not" (their underline, not mine) and the plausible deniability of the term "appear". A careful hedge for not asserting false statements. When you throw in "appears", that's a big CYA. I'll come back to this in a future post (and below) because these assertions got stronger and, in my opinion, crossed the line of ambiguity.

Example #2 — Contradictory statements!?!

From the September 2024 response to the first office action — and this is truly maddening:

While Phillips appears to make some contradictory statements regarding movement of polished rod, at best, Phillips only appears to be capable of detecting whether the rod is moving or not. However, the configurations of Phillips do not appear to be capable of measuring axial movement with the magnetometer.

Nope, still can't correct the misleading statement.

Contradictory statements!?! Here's the thing, the magnetometer can be both a compass (measuring rotational orientation) and a sensor to measure proximity, or position, or direction change. That's not contradictory. That's a complex description and that is why my application is easily 3x longer than theirs. It can do both and I had to talk about both uses. I laid this all out in detail, both in the actual disclosure (i.e. the prior art document) and in the third-party preissuance submission pointing to the relevant passages and figures.

Imagine reading this, knowing it's demonstrably incorrect — the record proves it — and being helpless to clarify your own words… And having already clarified them (see Dispatch No. 6). All the while realizing the examiner was starting to believe the applicant because that's easier than reading the documents.

Example #3 — Literally what a gyro senses

Further, Phillips does not disclose “determin[ing] rotational velocity of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system with the rotation sensor subsystem by sampling rotational velocity values generated by the rotation of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system with only the gyroscope,” as further recited in amended claim 1.

Sampling rotational velocity values is literally what a gyroscope measures. I can't be clearer than that. This doesn't require a POSITA, it's in the datasheets for the sensors ("dps" means degrees per second). Unlike a magnetometer (which doesn't measure position), a gyroscope actually directly measures rotational velocity (degrees per second). That shouldn't need an explicit disclosure. Note: in my disclosure I say I can use a gyroscope too and I explain how that would work. That part is critical to the whole stroke boundary issue and I'll follow this up with another post. There's a whole detailed section on this very concept in my disclosure.

When the applicant asserts that I do not [emphasis mine, note there's no hedging "appears" here] disclose “determin[ing] rotational velocity…”, that crosses the line. Now let me be precise, because the distinction matters: a patent lawyer will (rightly) tell you that arguing a reference “doesn't disclose” a limitation is argument, not a sworn statement of fact — so even a badly wrong version usually isn't an actionable “false statement.” Fine. Then call it what it actually is: advocacy aggressive enough, about something a gyroscope plainly does, to be flatly misleading — and notice they dropped the careful “appears” hedge that softened the earlier assertions. That dropped hedge is the tell.

They repeated these arguments (above) 10 separate times in the response to the first office action. What's that old saying about repeating the same wrong thing enough times?

To the examiner's credit, the Final Rejection pushed back on these falsities. But it was only based on my application, with no supplementary mention of that other document. But a Final Rejection was good; I don't care if the arguments could have been much stronger. But that's what left them an opening.

All of this is in the response to the first office action.

Example #4 — Typos or worse?

The text of a Claim 13 quotation in the RCE remarks is not the text in the amended claim 13. Holy crap, how deceptive does that look? Is this an error or intentional? I can't see inside anyone's head, so I genuinely can't say — but they amended the text of claim 13 in this same response, so I find it hard to read as a pure accident (that's my opinion, not a finding of fact). Either way, it's wildly misleading, and in my view unethical, consistent with the pattern I've described. Is this one illegal? I'm not qualified to say. I didn't even realize until writing up this post that this is what ended up in front of the examiner. Still, the examiner shouldn't have allowed any of it, but this claim 13 issue is really bad. Not the kind of bad that's just a mistake — it's the kind that changed the outcome. And of all five examples on this page, this is the one with real legal teeth: the others are arguments the applicant could lose and still fairly call advocacy, but misquoting the actual claim text in the remarks is a factual inaccuracy in the record — exactly the kind of affirmative misstatement the duty of candor is built to catch (if anyone could prove it was deliberate, which I can't).

I could have helped sort this out before it became an issued patent (and I tried, see Dispatch No. 10).

This is in the RCE remarks and the amended claims.

This bears a follow-up post because it's a good one. Stay tuned.

Example #5 — Sloppy amendments

They also deleted the vibration sensor from claim 13 and added it to claim 1 without the appropriate markup. That's an important nuance to the Notice of Allowance showing how little scrutiny was given to this application.

I already called out the examiner's repeated assertion that I don't disclose a 3-axis vibration sensor. It's right there in the prior art (see Dispatch No. 9) and specifically pointed to in the prior art submission (see Dispatch No. 6). I'll follow up on it in a future post too. I could have very easily set the record straight here, but the system has no safety valve for what I see as incompetent examination. No way for me to help identify the most basic of errors. And sneaky applicants know and exploit this simple fact.

The hindsight of equivalent terminology

Their whole argument hinges on equivalent terminology. That's not invention or innovation. They get my entire disclosure to craft something that sounds different, and all they have to prove is that it sounds different enough to exactly one person.

All while I sat silenced on the sidelines.

Silent — not by choice, but by the design of the system.

Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the earlier time this same idea was good enough to copy.
Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — the submission the examiner was free to ignore.
Dispatch No. 9 — The Overly Broad Claim Slipped Through — the overly broad claim at the center of it.
Dispatch No. 10 — Post-Allowance, Preissuance — What could I do? — what I could (and couldn't) do about it.
Dispatch No. 11 — Suspicious Allowance Timing — the sweet-talking-the-examiner speculation that this private conversation would confirm.
Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again — the Claim 13 misrepresentation this set up.
Dispatch No. 17 — Let's Ask Claude — where Claude untangled this same one-sided record.
Dispatch No. 29 — Independence Day — the standing public invite for the other side to answer.

Suspicious Allowance Timing

2026-05-31T12:00:00Z

I call him Intellectual Property Rick.^†

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies work I disclosed first. This one is the conspiracy-town detour: the patent was allowed five days before an acquisition closed. I can't prove a thing — it's just dates — and none of it changes the PGR's merits. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

Never attribute to malice…

I've been pretty good about not lobbing unfounded accusations (remember, everything on here is opinion and I am not a lawyer). My issue on this site is squarely with the USPTO. My opinion is that the applicant and their counsel did wildly unethical things that were — again, as I've said several times here — perfectly legal… possibly legal, I don't know for sure. I'm also a firm believer in the old adage of "Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity." It's much easier to believe the examiner just wasn't very good at the job — though I'd prefer to think they were just lazy (the two are indistinguishable in some instances and obviously this is all just my opinion). I've interacted with several examiners and generally they are very sharp, diligent, and professional. I appreciate the work they do. I do feel bad heaping all this on one examiner and a supervisor, but I'd also hope the good examiners want to weed out the bad ones. This examiner did a particularly bad job here. Feel free to set me straight here if I'm wrong.

Now for the conspiracy

First, I can't prove anything. All I have is dates — and every one of them is straight off the public record (the file wrapper and the acquisition's own press releases). Crazily suspicious dates. The kind that make you wonder.

Let me be precise about what's actually fueling this, because it's not much: two things, both straight off the public record. The dates — five days. And an allowance that reads like nobody spent much time on it. The Notice of Allowance is rushed and careless on its face — the overly broad claim that slipped through, the typos, the inattention to detail — barely proofread, and honestly reading like it was barely examined. A hurried, sloppy allowance landing in a convenient five-day window is the whole of what makes me raise an eyebrow. I'm not inferring misconduct from it; I'm noticing speed and sloppiness and finding the timing hard to ignore. Everything past this point is me speculating out loud, clearly labeled as such.

For this one, you need to know Big Corp was being acquired by an Even Bigger Big Corp. And Even Bigger Big Corp didn't do any of this. This all took place before they got the keys to Big Corp. I'm still holding on to hope the new parent company will take an interest and right this wrong, just out of the goodness of their Even Bigger Big Corp heart. But that's not what this post is about.

Here's the questionable scenario. The one that makes me a conspiracy nut:

It was an $8 billion acquisition.
It was dragging on for over a year.
Five days after the Notice of Allowance, the acquisition was finalized and publicly announced as complete.

Five fricking days — was this patent the thing the acquisition was waiting on? Yeah, probably not. To be clear: I have no evidence of any improper contact, and I'm not claiming any took place. All I have is the dates, and I'll leave you to opine on the timing. The allowance could have a perfectly mundane explanation — ordinary end-of-quarter docket pressure, coincidence, whatever. But the dates are the dates, and in my opinion this applicant's conduct (the text I believe was copied from my disclosure, what I read as misrepresented arguments, the typos, all of which I'll get to in future posts) hasn't exactly earned them the benefit of the doubt. Basically the totality of my experience makes me question this. I can't prove it, but I wonder.

Coincidence?

Yes, it totally could be a random coincidence. The overall timing of the prosecution, RCE, etc. was random and happened to put it within this window. That is a coincidence, of course. But it was on the examiner's desk in a very interesting time window. Probably one where the company being acquired was under pressure to tie up loose ends. I'm just saying… the timing was awfully coincidental. Some might say convenient, or maybe even urgent.

Examiners have had issues lately

And before you write me off as paranoid or a conspiracy nut: stuff happens. A USPTO employee agreed to pay $500,000 to resolve a conflict of interest; a former employee agreed to pay $122,480 over another. It got bad enough that Director Squires had to publicly respond to an examiner conflict-of-interest scandal. Am I saying that's what happened to me? No — to be clear, I have no evidence that this examiner had any conflict of interest, and I'm not alleging one. Those are unrelated cases; I mention them only to show this kind of institutional failure isn't impossible in the abstract — not because I think it happened here. Remember, this is all basically an honor system. My purpose in telling this story is to say the honor system is being abused. Maybe not here in my specific example, but assuming everything is fine is what got us here.

What do I actually think happened?

This is a story, so I can speculate. For the record I have no idea what really happened. No idea how the timing lined up. And I don't think the examiner took a bribe or had an intentional conflict of interest.

My intuition — what I venture to guess happened — would be more in line with the bumbling fool narrative. I prefer this explanation because it doesn't need any corruption, just incompetence.

Come on, just this once?

Say you were a sneaky attorney who did a really crappy job writing this application and people were starting to catch on. And say you caught wind you were going to be out of a job soon (i.e. the acquisition was going through any day now). You have a few choices: do nothing and leave the application to die on the vine, or try to call the examiner. You're probably under a lot of pressure to deliver this patent. Maybe you'd pull out all the stops and try to prove you're a good attorney. Maybe they'll throw more work your way after the acquisition. Again, for the record, I can't prove anything. This is pure speculation. Examiners are supposed to log these sorts of calls, but we all know they don't always. I mean that's more paperwork, and what have we already established about this particular examiner?

Would you call the examiner and try to sweet-talk them into going easy? Would you say whatever, knowing that you've already gone very close to that line (over the line in my humble opinion)?

Would that be improper? Would that be traceable? What even would have been discussed? A favor? Hey, we're all just trying to meet our quotas? I don't know, but I would believe an awful lot at this point.

Calling the examiner is great

The thing that is great about the examination process is also a deep, deep flaw. Remember no one else can say anything (coming up in the next post). Plus it's an honor system. You wouldn't want to ask anything inappropriate because the examiner might report you. You might get in trouble. But what can you say that is plausibly deniable? You'll see, when I get into the written correspondence, that you can say an awful lot of misleading things and face no consequences. I can only imagine what could be said off the record… given all the things I've seen on the record. Stay tuned for the documented misleading statements that I found in writing.

The record

What the record actually shows, though, is sloppiness — the Notice of Allowance speaks for itself, with its complete inattention to detail (see Dispatch No. 9). I don't need to guess at a motive to point that out; the carelessness is right there on the page, whatever its cause.

Either way — sloppiness or something worse — none of it is relevant to a PGR. The Board won't weigh whether the examiner had a conflict, just a bad week, or was just being a nice guy to the applicant; it re-decides the claims on the prior art and §§ 102/103/112. The timing is a coincidence I find hard to ignore, but the invalidity case stands without it.

The un-Rick.

† I swear I'm not trying to get this character to look like a Rick. The AI is slowly morphing him into that, unprompted. I'd call that a conspiracy, but the underlying mechanics of how this is happening are far less exciting. Side note: I wonder if I'm going to get sued for copyright infringement. I never asked for a character that looks like a Rick. I'm leaving it in here as a fair-use commentary on AI and how Rick is actually modeled on a generic inventor type. Basically, a guy like me in more ways than one. I think we all know how Rick would handle what I'd call the IP thieves, which would make a pretty good episode. Come on [adult swim], make a Rick and Morty episode on this, I won't even sue you for plagiarism… seriously you can have this story. You can see my original character on the home page. ↩

Dispatch No. 8 — Back From the Dead — how the application later came back from the dead.
Dispatch No. 9 — The Overly Broad Claim Slipped Through — the overly broad claim that got allowed.
Dispatch No. 12 — A Private Conversation, Held in Public — the misleading characterizations of the record.
Dispatch No. 14 — My Apology to Good Examiners — credit where it's due: examiners who do good work.
Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again — the Claim 13 misrepresentation this suspicious timing helped slip through.

Post-Allowance, Preissuance — What could I do?

2026-05-30T12:00:00Z

The sternly worded letter, in progress.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537. Once the flawed claim was allowed but not yet issued, my options narrowed fast. This one is what I could (and couldn't) do in that window — including a sternly worded letter. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

Once an examiner issues a Notice of Allowance, the train is moving and surprisingly hard to stop.

Once examination starts, the public is practically shut out — not from getting prior art in (the third-party submission window is still open early on), but from the back-and-forth itself: once you've filed, you have no right to respond to anything the applicant argues back. I describe it as a private conversation held in public. I'll do a follow-up post on this one because it's important. When you see the applicant making misleading statements, you are powerless to correct them. But now that the misleading statements resulted in a Notice of Allowance, you're even more powerless.

If I could fix the system

I'd put a cooling-off period in there. Ideally, I'd have a window where the USPTO basically asks, "we think this is allowable; public, what do you think?" Maybe another examiner should take a peek and weigh in too. Maybe a safety valve that lets you do what the PGR is supposed to be doing, but at the administrative level. I'd love to see something between "you can do absolutely nothing while your IP gets mischaracterized and taken" and this nutty PGR process. Basically, I think the PGR should be much easier than it actually is and should kick in once the examiner thinks it's allowable, opening a window for daylight to shine on the examination.

But that's not the case

I can't fix the system, but maybe someone reading this can.

So what could I do at this point?

Note: this was about 7-8 months ago.

The patent was allowed, under what I believe to be obviously flawed circumstances. Undeniably flawed (see Dispatch No. 9).

It had not technically issued yet, but the train was moving, so I wrote up my grievances in a sternly worded letter to the Director.^‡ This site is a much more detailed and entertaining version of that letter.

Surely (I thought) the USPTO would see the flaws and take corrective action. It was a long shot. Spoiler, it didn't work.

I was wrong. The USPTO's response was basically: "sorry, we won't be taking action." For what it's worth, the current Director (as of 2026) is doing great things for inventors at the USPTO. I sincerely hope the USPTO will see that this is a PGR in the purest form of its intended purpose, and that they will take a fair and honest look at the facts — and, more importantly, give me the benefit of the doubt. I didn't cause this mess. I actively tried to prevent it. I even paid a fee to that end (remember that third-party submission — see Dispatch No. 6). The PGR shouldn't be available only to corporations and large entities. This punitive financial burden is a deep problem.

† Ask my wife about this one. ↩

‡ Were there formal options? Technically, barely. A third party's protest under 37 CFR 1.291 generally has to be filed before the application is allowed — so that door had already closed. The only post-allowance levers — asking the Director to withdraw the application from issue under 37 CFR 1.313, or a petition to the Director — are discretionary and essentially never granted at an outsider's request. So the letter wasn't a procedural right; it was a longshot, and everyone involved knew it. ↩

Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — the third-party submission I'd already filed.
Dispatch No. 9 — The Overly Broad Claim Slipped Through — the overly broad claim I was trying to stop.
Dispatch No. 12 — A Private Conversation, Held in Public — why my hands were tied during examination.
Dispatch No. 28 — Let's Fix It — the fix: let the silenced party be heard before issuance.

The Overly Broad Claim Slipped Through

2026-05-29T12:00:00Z

“See, we can sneak in this overly broad claim here.”

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, the now-granted patent I believe copies work I disclosed first. This one needs only the Notice of Allowance and the final claims: the examiner allowed Claim 13 for reasons the claim doesn't actually contain. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

For this post, I have to provide some evidence in the form of actual quotes.

Here's the Notice of Allowance (NoA) and the examiner's reasoning:

Fig. 3 — my three-axis sensor (301).

[Notice of Allowance]
Philips [sic — the examiner spelled my name wrong, oh well] fails to teach a vibration sensor subsystem for monitoring vibration of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system in three axes;
[Seriously, I had a figure showing a generic three-axis sensor and referred to it as an accelerometer. Did this examiner really not understand that accelerometers, by definition, are for measuring vibration? Or just not read the document (you see a trend here, right?). This figure is not my proudest drawing, but it's undeniably a three-axis vibration sensor commonly called an accelerometer (also I referred to this figure to illustrate a magnetometer and a gyroscope, all three sense in three axes)]
continuing sampling the rotational values through a second direction change of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system; and
ceasing sampling the rotational values at a third direction change of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system.

It is for this reason, Claim 1 and all of it [sic] dependencies are allowed.

Claim 13, 16 and 19 include analogous, though not necessarily coextensive, features in conjunction with Claim 1, an [sic] is, therefore, along with its dependencies, for similar rationale as disclosed above, allowed.

I'll spare you the full text of Claims 1, 16, and 19, but here's the analogous text per the NoA:

[Their claim 1 (and 16, 19… but not 13)]
continuing sampling the rotational values through a second direction change of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system; and

ceasing sampling the rotational values at a third direction change of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system.

But for Claim 13, I need its full text (hint: look for the bit about the direction change or the bit about the vibration sensor that the examiner said were conditions for allowance):

[Their claim 13]
13. A sensor system for a downhole pumping system, comprising:

a sensor subsystem for detecting movement of at least one component of the downhole pumping system, the sensor subsystem comprising:

an axial motion sensor subsystem comprising an axial motion sensor, the axial motion sensor to be coupled to the at least one component of the downhole pumping system and to measure axial movement of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system based on variations detected by the axial motion sensor generated by movement of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system; and
["variation" - ok, analogous, though not necessarily coextensive… but still flawed. That's absolutely not what the examiner stated as allowable, and the applicant actually deleted the correct text in this amendment - but that's not even my issue with this claim]

a rotation sensor subsystem comprising a rotational sensor, the rotational sensor to be coupled to the at least one component of the downhole pumping system and to detect rotational movement of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system by sampling rotational values with the rotational sensor generated by rotation of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system; and

a processor subsystem to receive data from the axial motion sensor subsystem and the rotation sensor subsystem, the processor subsystem to:

verify the axial movement of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system with the axial motion sensor subsystem;

when the axial movement has been verified, detecting the rotational values with the rotation sensor subsystem during a current stroke of the downhole pumping system; and

comparing the rotational values with previously sensed rotational values detected by the rotation sensor subsystem during a previous stroke of the downhole pumping system to determine if rotation of the at least one component of the downhole pumping system has occurred.

Direct link to the Amended Claims

No “first”, no “second”, no “third” direction change. No direction change at all in claim 13.

The amendment actually deleted the "vibration sensor" terminology. Yeah, they took it out and the examiner didn't catch that. Seriously, double-check me on that one. See the Amended Claims.

Do you believe me when I say this examiner was asleep at the switch? This Claim 13 error (actually errors) should have been caught. It's so blatantly obvious.

Would I be infringing?

House always wins.

Here's the crazy part. The claim is so broad that, read literally, it reaches my own earlier work — the patented, published disclosure this patent is clearly based on, in both text and concept, all of it public before they filed. Sit with that: a claim that covers work already public before its filing date is, by definition, a claim that reads on the prior art — which is exactly why it's invalid, and exactly what this PGR is about. That's not me conceding I practice any valid claim — invalidity is a complete defense, but only once someone actually proves it; until then a patent is presumed valid and can still be waved around.^* Theirs is invalid; pointing that out is just a measure of how overbroad and improper this claim is. But again, that's not the point. The point was to not license my technology by quite literally using my own words against me to obtain a patent to then muddy the waters and justify ignoring me (remember, this is my opinion). And, more importantly, to sow confusion in the market. "See we have a patent, we're legit."

How is any of this fair? Is this legal jiu-jitsu? Did their attorney just do better? I don't think so, but there was a huge amount of luck… or something more suspicious (again, purely opinion on my part here).

I'll be picking apart this Notice of Allowance in a future post because this wasn't the only flaw by a long shot, but I hope you'll agree this one is a doozy.

* Again, there's no indication that's actually the case here — no one has waved this claim at me or accused me of anything. Heck, I'm not even selling a product. Remember how I got squeezed out of the market. I'm only saying that a claim this broad could be used that way. ↩

Dispatch No. 8 — Back From the Dead — the revival that let this broad claim through.
Dispatch No. 10 — Post-Allowance, Preissuance — What could I do? — what I could do once this broad claim was allowed.
Dispatch No. 11 — Suspicious Allowance Timing — the suspicious timing of that allowance.
Dispatch No. 12 — A Private Conversation, Held in Public — how the misleading arguments piled up unanswered.
Dispatch No. 13 — You Still Don't Believe Me About the Direction Change Thing? — why Claim 13 doesn't even contain the allowable language.
Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again — the Claim 13 misrepresentation, in full.
Dispatch No. 29 — Independence Day — the Independence Day coda, revisiting this overly broad, unproofread claim.

Back From the Dead

2026-05-28T12:00:00Z

This was quite the feat. More than just a lazy examiner.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies work I disclosed first. After a rejection, the applicant paid an RCE fee and the application came back to life as a granted patent. This one is how a “bad patent” gets made — over my ignored prior art. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

Here's a pro tip: apparently the bar to getting a patent is to get a final rejection, then pay the Request for Continued Examination (RCE) fee. That way the USPTO will know you're serious. If you're willing to pay another fee, you must have something patentable. See a theme here? The PGR has a really high fee, so if you're willing to pay that, you must be really serious. Well, I'm serious and I have a very real and easy-to-understand case, but am blocked by the burdensome fee. The RCE fee is trivial though. Why isn't it the other way around? Pay a lot to get a thorough examination — why do I have to pay that penalty for someone else's mistake?

Persuasive

Persuasive, apparently.

To explain the argument their examiner found persuasive, you'd have to be a person of ordinary skill in the art (this examiner obviously wasn't). Never fear, I have a great analogy. There's a process in this field that is so basic it's like walking. So basic everyone learns about it on day one. This thing is inherently obvious if you just think about it. In my application I say the equivalent of "over a step" (remember the walking analogy) in various contexts over 20 times. It's that thing everyone knows about, so I shouldn't have to list out the phases. That other document from Dispatch No. 4 gets even more specific. Sort of like "right foot, left foot".

Seriously, my third-party preissuance submission pointed to the prior art for this, and discussed how this is exactly what the prior art says with slightly different but equivalent terminology. That's why this is so troubling. Not only did the examiner not cite prior art, but my detailed explanation of this very concept (complete with specific citations) was completely ignored.

The problem with the process is the applicant can shift their position, but I can't add clarifying content. My third-party submission had it, but it needed a re-read from the examiner. Heck, I could have cleared this up real quick, but I was silenced.

The argument

Now for the argument that the examiner found persuasive and brought this application back from the dead and made it a patent:

You know how much I like analogies, right?
Applicant: "No, no, we're not taking a step. We lift our foot, move it forward, set it down. See that's something totally different." (still using the walking analogy, but this is very close to the actual argument)

Examiner: "Congratulations, you get a patent."

I'll dig into the details in some later posts, and you can argue it's an incomplete analogy, but it's pretty damn close.

After I filed the third-party preissuance submission (see Dispatch No. 6), I was done. Even when the arguments shifted, I couldn't add any more. That didn't matter though — I had already clearly addressed this in the submission. All I needed was for the examiner to do the job and read it. That was too much to ask. Actually, it wasn't too much to ask. I literally could not ask because the system is set up to deny public comment. Even when things are going off the rails, no one can point that out.

Either way, I was blindsided because the examiner rolled over on the argument. No pushback. No evidence he read the prior art. On the contrary, since I very specifically called this out in that same third-party submission, I can show it was there, served up on a platter, and promptly lost/forgotten/ignored. I don't know what the correct description is here. A ball was dropped, clearly. It's even more frustrating because twice before, the examiner had shown this very thing to be disclosed by my document. No explanation for unwinding that previous stance, just "sure, whatever… if you say so, I guess it's a patent then… stop bothering me"[my impression of the examiner].

The answer was in the prior art and pointed to by my submission!

I detailed the elements in each of the relevant claim mappings. Here's one such quote from my submission in regard to claim 7 (not the only place I explained this):

[My third-party submission]
It is well understood in the field of the invention that a “stroke” is defined by a “first” (bottom of stroke), “second” (top of stroke), and “third” (return to bottom of stroke) “change of direction”. The stroke could alternatively start at the top of stroke and continue to the next top of stroke.

And I go on to point to specific prior art documents here, none of which received any mention from the examiner.

No counter to that (heck, maybe I'm wrong, but the applicant should have had to explain why the examiner was wrong). No pushback from the examiner. The only explanation is the examiner didn't even read it. Claim 7 is interesting. I'll come back to this one later. Briefly, it defines this direction-change wordsmithing as "a stroke". Adding those words makes it seem like something else, something more specific, but it's not.

That flawed argument and the examiner's blind deference to the applicant are just the tip of the iceberg. I'll save that for a future post too, but the examiner also failed to proofread the text of the claims that were allowed. This let an independent claim slip through — one so broad that, taken at face value, it would reach work that was already public before they filed — my own published disclosure included. Let that sink in for a bit.

What looks to me like sloppy examination and inattention to detail by that same examiner, plus what struck me as a sneaky applicant, all produced a claim broad enough to possibly be turned back on the original inventor^* — even though everything it sweeps in was already mine and already public before they filed. To be clear, a claim that broad is invalid — broad enough to read straight onto what was already public, which is the textbook setup for anticipation (the mirror image of infringement: that which would infringe if it came later, anticipates if it came earlier). It would fall apart the moment anyone actually tested it. But don't mistake “invalid” for “harmless.” An issued patent comes wrapped in a statutory presumption of validity (35 U.S.C. § 282): in court, an accused infringer has to prove invalidity by clear and convincing evidence — a deliberately steep climb. That's exactly why a bad-but-issued claim is still a cudgel — it can be threatened with, and used to muddy the market, long before anyone knocks it down. (It's also why the PGR matters: there the patent gets no such deference — I'd only need to show unpatentability by a preponderance of the evidence, the lower bar. Same bad claim, very different burden depending on the venue.) None of that is even the point, though. The point is a claim this broad should never have issued.

* There's no indication that's actually the case — nobody has asserted this claim against me, or even threatened to. The point is only that a claim drawn this broadly *could* be turned in that direction. I'm describing the breadth of the claim, not an accusation anyone has made. And to be exact about that mirror: what reads on this claim is my earlier *published disclosure* — a prior-art document, which is why it *anticipates* — and I take no position here on whether anything I have built or sold practices any claim of this patent. ↩

And to be precise about what a PGR actually fixes: it isn't a referendum on the examiner. The Board doesn't grade his work — it re-decides patentability on the prior art and §§ 102/103/112. The sloppy examination is how this claim got through; why it falls is that the claim is invalid on the merits.

Think about why they'd do this

Why file a patent application on something so clearly copied — the wording literally, and, in my view, the underlying idea too?

First, there is no penalty. It's not illegal to do any of this. In my opinion, it's wildly unethical, but not illegal… actually, in my opinion it should be illegal too… but it's not.

“We live here now.”

Second, this was never about the patent itself. It was about muddying the waters so they wouldn't have to license my technology. Imagine if someone showed up at your house with a deed and said: "I live here now." Yeah, they're called squatters and there are laws to deal with that. Now if you went to the County and said "these guys don't own my house, here's proof, don't record that deed" and they just ignored you and recorded it anyway, wouldn't you be angry?

Now I have to prove to you that I'm right… stay tuned. I promise, by the time all of this comes out you'll absolutely believe me. The PTAB probably won't, but any reasonable person will.

Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the specifics of the copied idea.
Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — the prior-art submission that should have stopped this.
Dispatch No. 9 — The Overly Broad Claim Slipped Through — the overly broad claim this revival let through.
Dispatch No. 11 — Suspicious Allowance Timing — the suspicious timing around the allowance that revived this.
Dispatch No. 13 — You Still Don't Believe Me About the Direction Change Thing? — the Claim 7 / direction-change argument the revival turned on.
Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again — how the revived Claim 13 was misrepresented.

Progress — A Final Rejection

2026-05-27T12:00:00Z

His heart clearly wasn’t in the examination.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies work I disclosed first. By now Big Corp's application had drawn a rejection, but my prior-art submission was barely engaged. This one is that “final” rejection — and why the word means almost nothing. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

Spoiler: a Final Rejection isn't really final — after one lands, the applicant can reopen the whole thing with a Request for Continued Examination (an RCE), file amendments after final, or appeal to the Board. “Final” ends this round of prosecution, not the fight. But at least it was progress. By this point my patent had issued, but Big Corp was still ignoring me.

Here's the examiner's (non)Final Rejection.

I could only watch.

When they got the final rejection, I already knew how non-final those really are. What I was most concerned about were the arguments their examiner brought forth. The arguments were exceedingly weak and did not use that highly relevant document that was used against mine (remember the one that wasn't actually prior art for me… but certainly is for them — see Dispatch No. 4).

Hey, but at least it was something. I don't care how it was rejected, just that it was rejected.

For what it's worth, the examiner confirmed for a second time that I disclosed all these elements from claim 7 — again under § 102(a)(1). I'll come back to this eventually.

By this time they probably realized this examiner wasn't paying attention. The examiner's heart clearly wasn't in it — you can tell from the office actions. And my third-party preissuance submission was way too detailed to wave through without real work: actually engaging with it took effort, while a quick rejection made the whole case go away. Maybe he just wanted it off his desk? Is there any penalty for a poor examination? Of course not — this is government work. There are quotas to be met.

One note so this isn't misread: a weak examination isn't itself a reason to cancel a patent. In a PGR the Board re-examines the claims on their merits — the prior art and §§ 102/103/112 — no matter how little effort went into it the first time. The examiner's heart is the backstory; the prior art does the legal work.

Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the specifics of the idea they copied.
Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — the submission that was too detailed to wave through.

The Third-Party Preissuance Submission

2026-05-26T12:00:00Z

Delivering a tall stack of prior art the examiner didn't ask for — and would barely read.

Background — part of a series on my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537. The short version so far: a competitor's application was copying work I disclosed first, so I even paid to put the prior art in front of the examiner before it issued. This one is what that submission was — and how it got “considered” and ignored. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

This is the fee I reference in Dispatch No. 1. This is what makes the PGR and its burdensome fee really painful. I already paid a fee. I did the right thing.

Check out Dispatch No. 2. The image above is related to that one.

There's a quasi-unrelated backstory in Dispatch No. 4 that tells the tale of highly relevant prior art. Relevant to Big Corp's application, that is.

If you haven't read Dispatch No. 5, check that out. It frames this post. Lay the two documents side by side and, in my plain-English read of that record, Big Corp copied me in the most literal sense of the word — judge for yourself. But that has no bearing on whether they actually invented anything. In my view they copied the idea too — but proving that is an uphill battle (stick with me on that).

What could I possibly do here?

House always wins.

Here's where I could help the examiner. I shouldn't have had to do this, but there's a limited window, and if I didn't do anything I'd always regret it — just like here with the PGR. Leaving things to chance or the whim of an overworked government employee doesn't give me the warm and fuzzies. This shouldn't be a casino, but increasingly dealing with the USPTO feels like a huge gamble. Plus, the house always wins.

A third-party preissuance submission

Anyone can file third-party prior art against a pending application — it's called a preissuance submission, under 35 U.S.C. § 122(e) — but there are rules. You have to get it in during a limited window (before the later of six months after the application publishes or the first rejection of a claim, and before any notice of allowance), identify each document, include a concise description of why it matters, and pay a fee. The mechanics live in 37 C.F.R. § 1.290 and MPEP § 1134.01. The timing requirement is problematic because you have no idea what will shift in the allowable claims after the examiner and applicant enter into their public but exclusionary negotiations. So you can target the existing claims, but you have no idea how they'll change. That's fine though; I covered an awful lot. I'm happy with the document I produced describing the prior art. Many of the answers were in there. But I couldn't control where it went from there, or forsee the shifting arguments. Even still, a review of that submission would have flagged those shifting arguments.

A wealth of prior art — and the weight that comes with it — I carried it, but did they?

I was locked in a battle with my own examiner (on my application) and had a wealth of prior art used against me in the process. The most interesting part is documented in Dispatch No. 4. My examiner kept citing that specific document as prior art against mine because, remember, on the surface, it looks like it had an earlier priority date. I eventually got that point through, but if I had to deal with it as prior art (when it objectively was not prior art), certainly Big Corp should have to address that and all the others too. That's only fair, right? I'll definitely come back to this in a future post.

Stacks and stacks of prior art

Between my application and this other one, that should have been enough (actually, either document on its own should have been enough). Their examiner should have found all this independently. Still, I wasn't about to count on that, so I decided to lay out all the prior art to make things very easy for the examiner. Plus my examiner threw the proverbial kitchen sink at me, so I believed the other examiner should know about all those other citations too.

So I collected the prior art and pointed to it for the key claim elements, citing multiple documents. Note: this wasn't chaining multiple references. My application and this other one, each on its own, had plenty of relevant disclosures — enough to sink this application (and in the hands of a competent examiner either would have). You mostly only get one shot at this third-party preissuance submission. The applicant can shift their stance and mislead the examiner, but after filing the submission (and the window closes), you're done. That's it. If the examiner ignores it, too bad.

Submitting the submission

I submitted it and crossed my fingers (after some drama with Patent Center and a diversion to EFS-Web). It got kicked back with some review edits, which were easy enough. The third-party preissuance submission doesn't go straight to the examiner; it gets reviewed by its own dedicated examiner. It's actually a good process, and if I had my way, that would be expanded. You should be able to challenge patents during examination, when you see the examiner making mistakes or the applicant making misleading characterizations of the prior art, not just before they start examining. But that's not the case. You have to stand by and watch the applicant say things that are not accurate, and watch the examiner ignore the obvious. As an inventor, you can only watch as your technology is handed to someone else by an overworked government employee.

The tragedy of prior art

Here's the tragedy in the examination process. A document number in the file means "considered." Not read. Not understood. Not applied in a substantive argument. Per MPEP § 609.05(b) — that's the standard for an information-disclosure statement, but it applies by direct analogy here, since a preissuance submission (MPEP § 1134.01) is treated the same way — that consideration "means nothing more than considering the documents in the same manner as other documents in Office search files are considered by the examiner while conducting a search of the prior art." In other words, the examiner had the opportunity to do their job and the assumption is they did. In this case they certainly did not fully read the prior art and they certainly did not fully understand its relevance. The examiner unequivocally did not apply the prior art in a competent manner. I pointed to the relevant prior art in this submission, which moves the needle from lazy and careless to questionable. Did my prior art overwhelm the examiner? Did simply submitting it offend the examiner? If you read the file you'll (hopefully) agree this got a pathetically unrigorous examination given the circumstances. But because I submitted that document, it's "considered" and so it's an uphill battle from here.

Did the examiner actually read it?

"Considered" — straight into the shredder.

There's at least one bit about position, velocity, etc. that was used in an office action. But I'm pretty sure, after the first skimming pass, it was never thought of again. I can point to very specific examples that were missed or conveniently "forgotten" in the subsequent office actions. Remember that highly relevant prior art from Dispatch No. 4? Completely dropped after the First OA. This specific prior art should have been leaned on even harder. That document alone had enough to demonstrate each and every claim element on its own, not just mine. In some ways it may have even been a better singular reference than mine. That's why I think this examination was deeply flawed. That's why I believe the stated § 102 grounds were far weaker than they should have been.

I can't overstate the tragedy here: my submission actually strengthened the examination (in theory) because it was placed in front of the examiner. The examiner has no obligation to prove they read it. Just by entering that document number into the file, that's proof enough. It would be fairly easy to demonstrate how the highly relevant prior art was not read or understood. When I say that second document was "forgotten" after the First OA, that statement is legally refuted by a simple number in the file. Officially it wasn't "forgotten," because of that single cut and paste of the document number. But its relevance and applicability were not rigorously addressed. I think "forgotten" is an apt description because no mention was made of it in the Final Rejection or the Notice of Allowance. I can't think of a better way to describe it.

"Considered" means pretty much anything you want it to mean except for "ignored," "deposited in the trash," "swept under the rug," or any other description that accurately depicts how it was actually handled.

Here's a fun fact^†

This was the only third-party preissuance submission this examiner ever received… EVER! The only one!

Maybe the examiner really had no clue what to do with it? That would explain an awful lot. What do you do with something you've never dealt with before? Ignore it till someone calls you out, right?… Well, in this case I couldn't call it out. I saw it happening, but couldn't do anything about it.

† In fairness, this wasn't an exhaustive search. I just pulled records from the examiner's case histories and looked for those document codes. Mine was the only third-party submission instance. But feel free to check my work there. ↩

Dispatch No. 1 — I tried to prevent this mess — paying the office to consider prior art it then ignored.
Dispatch No. 2 — Why a PGR? — why the Post Grant Review is the tool that fits this mess.
Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the earlier time this idea was good enough to copy.
Dispatch No. 5 — Where have I heard this before? — the déjà vu that sent me digging.
Dispatch No. 7 — Progress — A Final Rejection — the (non-)final rejection that followed.
Dispatch No. 8 — Back From the Dead — how the application came back from the dead afterward.
Dispatch No. 10 — Post-Allowance, Preissuance — What could I do? — what I could still do once it was allowed.
Dispatch No. 12 — A Private Conversation, Held in Public — why I couldn't make the examiner actually read this.
Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again — where the Claim 13 shenanigans come into focus.
Dispatch No. 17 — Let's Ask Claude — where Claude confirmed this submission held everything the examiner needed.
Dispatch No. 20 — New material, not in the disclosure — where the disputed "previous stroke" material traces back to this submission.
Dispatch No. 22 — § 102 — Nothing New Here — where this submission's prior art anticipates their claims under § 102.
Dispatch No. 28 — Let's Fix It — the fix: give third-party submissions real weight, not just a "considered" stamp.
Dispatch No. 29 — Independence Day — the Independence Day coda, where this early attempt to stop it becomes the "I tried" of the story.

Where have I heard this before?

2026-05-25T12:00:00Z

The déjà vu moment — that's my awkward sentence, in their application.

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537. The competitor I call Big Corp filed an application on my technology; this is the moment I recognized my own awkward sentence inside it. This one is the literal copying. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

This wasn't the first patent I drafted. A few years prior I was consulting for a company and we co-developed some unrelated technology (same field, totally different invention). I was enlisted to help draft that patent application (I'm listed on that patent, by the way).

In that application there was an oddly worded description of the rod-string. I reworded the sentence a little, but it was still oddly phrased. Not wrong, just not the phrasing a person having ordinary skill in the art would have used. The kind of phrasing you get from an attorney, but not enough to completely rewrite. Fast-forward to 2018, when I needed to file my own non-provisional application. I used the same attorney, and we used the same basic framework text as the first draft. I rewrote that sentence yet again, but it was still oddly phrased. In effect, I copied myself here.

It's déjà vu all over again

With apologies to Yogi Berra.

Fast-forward to 2023. I found Big Corp's published application and got to the phrase "thin joints of steel bar that are threadedly connected through couplings" and instantly recognized that I had heard that before, but where? Why was that oddly phrased sentence so familiar? That's right, because I had rewritten it… multiple times. They were my own words, in an application for the exact same technology, with someone else's name on it. Go ahead and Google that exact phrase.

Now when you read these two applications you'll say what everyone says: but it's just the background section — and you'd be absolutely correct. That has no bearing on infringement and has no bearing on whether they actually copied my idea. No bearing on whether they truly invented anything. All true and fair statements. But if you're so lazy as to copy text from the very patent you are trying to design around, what are the chances you're a sharp enough inventor to have truly invented something novel? Certainly luck and a series of systemic failures were at work here — but that does not equate to a novel invention.

Applicant-admitted prior art

And here's the part that isn't just an ethics gripe: when their Background recites the rod-string, the rotation problem, and the rest as known art, that's an admission. The law calls it applicant-admitted prior art — the applicant's own on-the-record statement that those elements were already known. It won't, by itself, do the heavy lifting — the invalidity grounds still rest on the real references — but it's powerful corroboration: the applicant, on the record, conceding this groundwork was old. So the copied Background isn't only lazy; it's a signed confession to exactly that, and it returns to back up the prior-art grounds when they get serious.

And there's a procedural bonus to raising this in a PGR specifically: the admission is fair game here. In an inter partes review, the sort of applicant-admitted prior art sitting in a patent's own Background can't be the basis of a ground — an IPR runs only on patents and printed publications, and the Federal Circuit said exactly that in Qualcomm v. Apple, 24 F.4th 1367 (Fed. Cir. 2022). A PGR isn't fenced in that way: its grounds reach any basis for invalidity under § 282(b), so this on-the-record concession can back the prior-art case directly instead of getting bounced at the door.

Do you need proof?

I did some side-by-side comparisons. What do you think? They did some light editing. What I really want to know is: was this just lazy? Or is the system so horribly broken that this was done knowing full well there would be absolutely no repercussions? By the end of this, you might believe me when I say I'm pretty sure it's the latter.

Their ¶¶ [0001]–[0002] vs. my ¶¶ [0005]–[0007] — highlights mark the shared language. Tap to enlarge.

Lightly edited, reorganized. But clearly copied. Clearly, right? You see what I see, don't you?

Their ¶ [0003] vs. my ¶ [0009] — the rod-string sentence I had reworded, word for word.

I see what they did here. I talk specifically about the rod-string, but they wanted to broaden it to tubing. They just cut the rod-string-specific wording to broaden it. Also this paragraph held the déjà vu all over again — "thin joints of steel bar that are threadedly connected through couplings".

Their ¶ [0004] vs. my ¶¶ [0010]–[0011] — friction, wear, and the rotation fix.

I think the directionality of the wellbore was an important distinction, but hey, sometimes less is more. In their case, much less is much more.

Their ¶ [0005] vs. my ¶¶ [0013]–[0014] — they didn't even try here.

Wow… Just wow. Hardly even edited. This isn't monkeys on typewriters, right? You see what happened here, right? My exact words attributed to someone else. Have some integrity. But again, why have integrity when there is no repercussion for unethical practices?

This is not fair use

When several folks at the USPTO said to me: "oh, that happens all the time," this is what they meant. Fair use, not important. Mechanical text, not creative (it's oddly phrased enough to be creative in my opinion). I happen to think the entire patent application is a creative document in every sense of that word.

But here's the crux: yes, I copied text (my own), but I had permission. That's an important distinction. Even if I didn't have permission, who cares, right? Well, if you use my words in the process of also copying my core technology, it should be abundantly clear why I would have a problem with that. If it was copied for some other unrelated technology, I'd probably never even know… but this one I knew.

If you want to mechanically copy my patent (the other part of copyright, i.e. post the patent on your web page, or print copies and hand them out), that's fine. But this. This is not ok. Could you say they obtained this patent under false pretenses? I sure think so. To be clear, the legal version of that charge — inequitable conduct, a fraud on the Office, duty of candor, etc. — sits behind a deliberately high bar: you need a material misrepresentation made with the specific intent to deceive the examiner, and I'm not formally leveling that here. I'm saying it fails the smell test. The law and the smell test don't always agree — and that gap is most of what this blog is about.

Even if you still don't see my perspective on the deeper idea copying, to my mind this literal copying is ethically wrong. There's no excuse for this. Worse, there is no penalty for this, so here we are. You can literally copy someone's patent application and get one of your own. That's wrong and shameful. But no one seems interested in putting a stop to it.

You might call it a workaround

I also know this has no bearing on any technology disclosed in the rest of the document. You should go read the full disclosure independently. Read it with a skeptical eye. What was the true intent of that application? To actually invent something? Or to, just like the above text comparisons, lightly edit the content to make it seem different, but (again just like the above examples) not actually add any useful content beyond what already existed?

A workaround is a perfectly fair thing to patent. This is how the patent system is supposed to work. That's not what happened here. The copied text is just illustrative. Give me the benefit of the doubt and I'll prove the rest. I'd still be having this discussion if they didn't copy text, but the copying makes everything so clear and obvious. Look carefully at the rest of their disclosure and you'll see nothing new was presented. It's just wrapped in different terminology. This is wordsmithing, not innovation.

Eventually I'll post about how the patent system "should" work… but it might take a while to get through all of this first.

Somehow I'm the bad guy

What's worse is the USPTO even went so far as to say it was improper for me to point this copying out. Seriously. It's perfectly fine to plagiarize, but "we draw the line at pointing it out." I'm not making that up (well, I made up that quote, but that was the gist of it). Not once, but multiple times. The examiner of my third-party submission (coming up in the next post) and the Office of Enrollment and Discipline (OED) both said it too. Should I file a formal complaint? I wonder how punitive the fee for filing a complaint is…

“Yep — but perfectly legal.”

I understand this is a non-issue… mostly. At least in the framework of patent law. But you should agree this is at the very least sloppy and lazy — and, in my opinion, highly unethical. Or… and this is my opinion… it's an indication of how bad things are in the state of innovation. "Hey, we can just copy this. There's no downside."

Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — where I turned this recognition into a formal third-party prior-art submission.
Dispatch No. 29 — Independence Day — the Independence Day coda that ties this déjà vu back to the constitutional bargain.
And pretty much all the rest.

The first time this idea was good enough to copy

2026-05-24T12:00:00Z

Someone caught wind — and improperly claimed an earlier priority date.

Background — this is part of a series on my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, the patent I believe copies my oil-well rotation-sensing work. This one is the prequel: years earlier, a different company brushed up against the idea — and this episode produced the prior-art document that matters later. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

I got ripped off 4 times

So far… four times (four separate companies that I know of at least) I've felt my technology was usurped. This post is about the first time. I can't even call this one getting ripped off, but you'll see what I mean. Most of this blog (other posts) revolves around the 2nd time, but this is the first one. This one's important because it resulted in a very important prior art document. One that the examiner (for the next story) did not adequately apply as prior art.

Back story

In 2017, I filed my provisional application and then did what you're supposed to be able to do: I went blabbing all over town looking for financial backing, all while developing the product and running field tests. I was literally out in the field strapping cell phones to pumping units (I'll get to that eventually). I had filed the application, I thought I was good. Just to be double sure you understand, I filed the provisional application first, and then started talking about it.

Somewhere through the grapevine the concept reached someone who was working on a loosely related sensor. It was a completely different system but close enough to modify for my technology. They had also filed a provisional application a couple of months before mine (remember: completely different technology - that's important).

Two things you should know at this point

First, I don't think anything nefarious took place here. This wasn't Big Corp, it was long before that. This is a side-story that has some relevant details for that story, which I'll get to later.
Second, when you file a patent there are some distinct timelines:
- If you file a provisional, you have one year to file the real application. You can add new material at that point — that's allowed — but anything new only gets the later filing date, never the provisional's earlier one. Hold onto that distinction; it turns out to be the whole ballgame later in this story.
- The application publishes 18 months after your earliest priority date (for me, the provisional — not the later non-provisional filing).

Pre-publication is a scary time

When I caught wind of this other company, it was in that 18-month pre-publication window.^† Neither of our applications was published. I saw some marketing material, but had no idea if it was a finished product. No idea if they beat me to the patent office. The problem with inventors like me is that we don't go to market until it's ready. Some folks go to market first, and figure it out later (that's probably the better approach).

† There are always exceptions to the rule. There are ways to hold off publication and to get a patent before the 18-month publication, but as you'll see in this story, there is no public comment so it doesn't matter much. ↩

Did they independently invent the same thing? Was it an idea whose time just came, and if it wasn't me, it was bound to be someone else? I didn't know and nothing was published, so I'd have to wait at least until my application published and do another thorough patent search. Note, I invented it and I filed first for the actual invention — their provisional was earlier on paper, but it didn't disclose the relevant content, so it doesn't get that early date — though I wasn't 100% sure of any of that yet at this point in the story (the initial 18-month window… this was around the summer of 2019).

It turns out, I filed first!

When I saw this other company, I severely pulled back my expenditures because I didn't know if I was going to be protected (I still naively believed a patent offered at least some protection, so I kept prosecuting the application, but the hard development work slowed to nights and weekends). When I finally found their published application, I was heartbroken. There it was: my idea, with an earlier priority date — or so the cover page made it look. I wish I had just left it there. But no, I kept reading. I found the original provisional application… the one with the earlier date. It had Nothing! None of my idea was in that original disclosure. That means they added content after my filing date.

Cautiously optimistic — though trouble was lurking.

So I was good on the priority date. That's not just me being optimistic — it's the rule: under the AIA, a reference only earns its provisional's early date for what that provisional actually discloses (35 U.S.C. § 102(d)). Theirs disclosed none of this, so, as to my invention, their date was the later filing, not the provisional's. But fate wasn't done with me yet: not long after, COVID hit (see Dispatch No. 3).

No ill will

I should reiterate that I have no reason to believe this specific company did anything nefarious (I mean the company before Big Corp copied me). My application wasn't public yet, and I hadn't contacted them directly. Adding content to a non-provisional isn't exactly wrong, but it sure jammed me up later. On the surface it looked like they filed first. There's a published document with a date prior to mine. But that's …easily… cleared up, and the system ultimately worked as designed to resolve that.

The irony of inaction

It's irony, right?

Through no action on my part, the relevant claims in this other application were mysteriously withdrawn (no apparent record in the file of why). My assumption is either the applicant pulled them proactively or the examiner mentioned this on a call. Either way the system worked by preventing the claims pertaining to my technology from issuing. I wouldn't be that lucky the next time. The next time I took the appropriate action within the limited bounds of the system. When I do nothing, the system works. When I do the exact thing the system says I can do, the system completely fails (stay tuned for that story).

Just so it's clear, good examiners do good work (the story above is proof). I'm not just a whiny inventor. This part of the story shows how the system should work. Unfortunately, not all examiners do good work (the rest of the story proves that too).

Unequal & inconsistent examination

Same Office, two examiners, very different work.

The big punchline here is that, in getting my own patent, I had to address this document (the one with the earlier priority date, but without the corresponding earlier disclosure) in three office actions. I finally got my examiner to accept that the earlier document didn't support any of his stated rejections because it was in fact not prior art. That was a hard fight, but the evidence was clear. Side note, I just had to deal with this same issue yet again on a divisional. That's four times I had to address something that is not prior art to me (but it sure looks like it should be, if you only look at the listed date). Big Corp — the company I'm going to talk about next — never had to deal with this document in any substantive way, even though it is clearly prior art to Big Corp's application. And for Big Corp's application, none of this priority date hair-splitting even matters: by the time Big Corp filed, this document had long since published, so it's plain, on-its-face prior art against them — no provisional analysis required. That's a problem. Unequal examination.

This is the prior art I'll reference

I just want to reiterate. My idea filtered through the grapevine, someone (probably not knowing I had filed an application) sat down and wrote it up in substantial detail. This is a highly relevant document to anyone applying for a patent on this technology. This is the "other" prior art I'm going to reference in future posts when I talk about Big Corp and how their examiner ignored the prior art. This is the document and how it came to be.

This is a very relevant document for any invention in this space. I was first, but this one is just as important as prior art to any subsequent application (i.e. to Big Corp's application).

2 documents disclose this separately!

I'll say this again because it's nuanced (but the story above shows how it happened). There are 2 completely separate documents — independent documents — that thoroughly disclose the claims in the patent this whole blog is complaining about. These documents are independent — you don't need to combine them. My own application discloses the whole invention on its own; the other document gets you there too. Neither is a partial disclosure (i.e. one that only works stitched to the other). But, the examiner ignored one, and barely grasped the other. That is a big problem and is exactly what I'll cover in future posts.

Dispatch No. 1 — I tried to prevent this mess — the blog's opening, and the ignored fee this side-story feeds into.
Dispatch No. 2 — Why a PGR? — why a PGR became the tool for this mess.
Dispatch No. 3 — A Man Who Is His Own Lawyer Has a Fool for a Client — going it alone, pro se, against a corporate applicant.
Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — where I laid out the prior art in detail.
Dispatch No. 7 — Progress — A Final Rejection — the examiner's (non-)final rejection that followed.
Dispatch No. 8 — Back From the Dead — how the application later came back from the dead.
Dispatch No. 12 — A Private Conversation, Held in Public — how this prior art was ignored during the public examination.
Dispatch No. 14 — My Apology to Good Examiners — my apology to the examiners who get it right.
Dispatch No. 15 — Strapping Cell Phones to Oil Wells — the cell-phones-on-oil-wells story.
Dispatch No. 17 — Let's Ask Claude — where Claude pinpointed how this prior-art document got dropped from the record.
Dispatch No. 22 — § 102 — Nothing New Here — how this document anticipates their claims on its own under § 102.
Dispatch No. 28 — Let's Fix It — the fix built on this dispatch's "irony of inaction": make examiners actually apply the prior art.

A Man Who Is His Own Lawyer Has a Fool for a Client

2026-05-23T12:00:00Z

The proverb says I have a fool for a client.^†

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, the patent I believe copies work I disclosed first. This one is why I'm doing it without a lawyer: no micro-entity discount on the fee, nothing left to lose, and AI to help draft. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

Nothing to gain — so nothing to lose

I gain nothing from this PGR. Shocking, right? No damages, no attorney fees, no license agreement, no apology from the USPTO. Another way to look at it: I have nothing to lose. None of this has anything to do with my patent. Legally, there's a clear line. Say I lose this and their patent is deemed fully valid. Well, that's the case right now. Today. I think that's wrong and needs to be corrected. But if I'm wrong and it doesn't get corrected, I'm in the same position — I just can't keep crying about it.

The patent shouldn't exist

This patent served a very different purpose (in my opinion), and it's not what the system is designed for. Remember, this is all my opinion. I'm telling my side of the story. You might argue the fact they have a patent has no impact on me… except it does. First they get to say they have a patent (which would be fine if they'd invented anything — in my opinion, they didn't). That creates confusion in the market. That's a problem that infringement doesn't address. Second, having a patent doesn't mean the actual product they built works like that (you'll see that when I start talking about § 112 later). It also does not mean that product works like my patent either. So what's the point of having a patent then? My opinion is it was an excuse to justify not licensing my technology. Why license when you can just take, right?

The back story

The system practically dares you to do it yourself

The USPTO encourages^‡ pro se prosecution of patent applications. They are super helpful and I used them a bunch for this and other patents. That part is great, but it lures the unsuspecting into a financial trap — one I've so far been careful to avoid. You get hung out to dry. Many others haven't been so lucky.

‡ “Encourages” may be too generous a word. ↩

Congress also required, by law,^†† reduced fees for so-called micro entities — i.e., poor people. If the USPTO were a corporation, it would be charged with deceptive marketing practices because the PGR fee is carved out of the discount. We'll give you a break on the fees, but when it comes to correcting our own mistakes, you pay full freight. A huge middle finger to the inventor.

It's also ironic because the PTAB (via IPR more than PGR) has traditionally been used as a weapon to crush inventors like me. When I want to use the system for its legitimate and honorable purpose, I'm priced out by this burdensome fee.

†† Micro entity status comes from the America Invents Act: 35 U.S.C. § 123 defines who qualifies, and 35 U.S.C. § 41(h) mandates the steep fee reduction — which the Unleashing American Innovators Act of 2022 actually raised to 60% (small entity) and 80% (micro-entity). So Congress just sweetened the discount… but before you ask “didn't they fix this?” — no: those reductions attach only to the prosecution-side fees the statute lists (filing, searching, examining, issuing, appealing, maintaining) and don't reach a PTAB trial fee like a PGR. Congress trimmed the cheap fees and left the single most expensive one at full freight for everyone, rich or poor. I guess no one expects the poor folks to actually want to protect their IP… if they did, they wouldn't be poor, right? ↩

I almost switched careers

Crude oil (CL=F), 10-year view — the 2020 collapse is the dip that made me a micro-entity.

Remember what happened to the oil industry around April 2020… when the price of oil went negative? Hard to fathom given where oil sits in May of 2026, but back in 2020 I took a significant financial hit — and qualified for micro-entity status. I was one of those "poor people" for a bit. I fell for the deceptive marketing.

In 2020, I seriously considered a change of occupation. I registered to take the patent Bar. Spoiler: I didn't end up taking it. But I did get past the OED's restrictions on a Master's degree in Computer Science — I'm still not sure why that specific degree carried additional restrictions (see page 4), but I had to submit actual transcripts, as if I were applying to college all over again (if I had a regular Bachelor's degree in CS, it would have been a cinch). By the way, I paid a fee for that, too.

Why I didn't switch careers

When studying for the patent Bar, I dug deeply into the world of IP, realized the state of US innovation was (and still is) in a terrible place, and I rapidly lost interest in pursuing this as a career change. At my core, I am an inventor. What I see happening in US innovation is a tragedy. I'd rather be inventing, but instead I'm navigating the system. No one benefits from that.

The previous Directors of the USPTO steered that ship far off course. I'm happy to see statements like this from the current Director, but I am also painfully aware that what I am personally seeing and experiencing in my own case will far outlive these positive developments. As long as the USPTO hands out patents without thorough review, legally handing hard-earned IP to someone else because of sloppy examination and a complete lack of accountability, we will continue to lose our competitive edge as an innovation center.

Why me, why now

In short: I know the technology and the field intimately. I'm reasonably intelligent (which is clearly up for debate). And I have practically nothing to lose. My clock is running out. If I don't file this PGR, I'll regret it. If I lose, it'll be on a procedural gotcha — not on the merits — so I'm willing to take that gamble. Heck, they probably will ignore this too.

And there's AI

Remember that whole Master's-in-Computer-Science thing? As an engineer, I can honestly say the legal system is a corrupt mess — but it's a system, and I can work with a system. All the prior art is there. All the precedential decisions are there. All this needs is to combine those into a coherent document (oh, and that burdensome fee to keep folks like me at bay). Stay tuned.

† It appears my AI-generated inventor character is slowly morphing into a Rick. Unintentional, but interesting. ↩

Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the earlier, pre-patent episode that first showed this idea was worth copying.
Dispatch No. 19 — Bounding to a single stroke — where my computer-science background comes back into the argument.

Why a PGR?

2026-05-22T12:00:00Z

Pay us to fix our mistakes that you already paid us to avoid in the first place.

Background — part of a series documenting my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, the patent I believe copies work I disclosed first. This one explains what a PGR is — and why I'm paying the USPTO's most expensive fee to fix its own mistake. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

A picture is worth 1,000 words

I have lots of pictures. The one above sums it up. Here's my take: "We created this mess so you need to pay us to fix it."

The PGR was built for exactly this

A Post Grant Review is the mechanism Congress created to let the USPTO clean up its own mess. It lives in Chapter 32 of the Patent Act (35 U.S.C. §§ 321–329). The short version:

You can challenge a freshly issued patent on essentially any ground of invalidity — §§ 101, 102, 103, and 112 — because § 321(b) lets a petitioner raise anything that could be raised under 35 U.S.C. § 282(b).
But you have to move fast: the petition must be filed within nine months of the grant (§ 321(c)).
The Board only institutes if it's “more likely than not” that at least one challenged claim is unpatentable (§ 324(a)). The procedural rules live in 37 C.F.R. Part 42.

In other words, the PGR was built precisely for this scenario: a patent that should never have issued, caught early, and corrected. Great. Except that it's the most expensive fee the USPTO has — more expensive than an IPR — even though its explicit purpose is to fix the Office's own errors. Errors that could have been avoided in the first place.

The grounds, not the process

I'll spend a lot of this blog complaining about examination mistakes and misleading statements, typos, etc. That explains how this system is flawed, but those are not the grounds for a PGR. You can have a perfectly good application become a patent with a horribly inept examination. Likewise, you could have a really good patent denied by an unreasonable examination. The process is wildly subjective, which is a problem in itself.

Sometimes you get a confluence of a terrible examination and a terrible patent, and the sum of those parts is what this story is about.

The proper grounds are §§ 102, 103, and especially 112 — with § 101 as background commentary, not a ground I'm raising. That proves the patent should never have been issued, but none of that addresses the inequity of examination or how that can go unchecked. The system is deeply flawed and needs fixing.

And one more thing worth flagging right now: the examiner didn't raise a single § 112 objection — even though the application is chock-full of § 112 issues. Written description, definiteness, enablement (or lack thereof): take your pick. We'll come back to that.

An analogy — Seatbelts

The seatbelt’s right there — he just isn’t wearing it.

I like analogies. You'll figure this out. As a society we've all decided wearing seatbelts is a good policy. The seatbelt itself is burdensome and uncomfortable. It slows us down and inconveniences us. The collective problem is that when we get in an accident, the accident externalizes that cost. The ambulance… the hospital… Forget the property damage. Forget what happened to the person not wearing the seatbelt. It's the medical bills and utilization of resources that are the cost to society. We made laws to require seatbelts. That reduces the worst of the negative outcome on the rest of society. It doesn't eliminate it — you can still drive like a maniac. But, if you crash, it's less likely you'll go to the hospital.

The examination quotas and push for allowance are the reckless driving (i.e. rushed examination). Bad/low-quality patents are the accident. The PGR is the ambulance ride and the hospital. There are no seatbelts! We all pay for this, but me most of all. And I wasn't even on the road.

A voice

I could file for ex parte reexamination, but then, like the third-party submission (stay tuned, I'll get to that), I'd be silenced: a third-party requester drops out after filing the request and has no further voice in the back-and-forth. I'd have to sit quietly by and trust the system. I did that once and it failed miserably.

Plus there are a bunch of § 112 issues that need addressing, and the PGR is the only venue for that.

But everyone would do PGRs

Yes — everyone realized how sloppy the USPTO can be and how often this safety valve would be used (and probably abused). Instead of fixing the underlying problem of examination and allowance quality, Congress figured there needed to be a self-regulating, self-filtering mechanism: an astronomical fee designed to keep frivolous requests away. My case is not frivolous, but I am shut out in a financial sense.

Would you pay $59,375^‡ to be right? Not to resolve anything. Not to recover damages. Not to stop infringement. Just to correct an error someone else made — to restore the exclusive right the patent was supposed to secure for me (by the Constitution via Congress), a right taken away by the same Office that then gets to cash the nearly-$60k check for a chance for that same Office to review their own sloppy work.

I didn't cause this error. In fact, I did everything right (within the mechanisms afforded by law) to help the USPTO not screw this up… but it wasn't enough.

Is it really the most expensive fee?

Yeah, probably. It certainly is in the USPTO fee schedule. I went looking for other fees and couldn't find an analogous one. The fee for drilling an oil well? $12,850. But that's for doing something productive (whether you like it or not, that's a fee for doing something). Likewise, there are fees for certifying drugs, airplanes, etc. All of which are for doing something productive. There are fees for screwing up, like if you spill a bunch of oil while drilling, but guess who pays for that?

As far as I can tell, the PGR fee is one of the few (if not the only) fees that the innocent party is on the hook for when someone else failed (i.e. the USPTO in its basic duty of examination). And it's prohibitive. By my math, it's nearly 150x what it costs to get a patent. That's at micro-entity rates (which carry a 4-application cap). Or, 75x the cost of a patent for a small entity with no cap. That means I could file 75 utter garbage slop applications for the cost of the PGR (just filing fees). What are the chances a few of those garbage applications sneak through? I wonder if I could patent the process of patenting garbage patents. I bet someone's already done that.

I've been quoting the fees alone

The true cost is closer to $300,000 when factoring in attorneys. The issues I'm raising here shouldn't require attorneys. Resolving them should simply require a competent and thorough examination. I hope to illustrate how this patent was neither competently examined, nor thoroughly examined. That shouldn't cost $60,000 - $300,000 to fix.

So how does a PGR benefit me?
It doesn't.

Here's the part that surprises people. The simple, honest answer is that a PGR does not benefit me in any tangible way.

I'm on the hook for a substantial fee and a mountain of work to draft the petition — all because the examiner didn't do what the MPEP plainly requires: conduct a thorough search of the prior art (MPEP § 904) and then properly analyze and apply it (MPEP §§ 2103, 2141). The art was right there. Applying it was the job. It's clear the examiner did not grasp the physical sensing characteristics at issue, or show even the most basic understanding of the field of the invention.

Assuming the best-case outcome — I figure out how to pay this punitive fee, I win, and the bad patent is canceled — what's my prize? I will have corrected a grievous error. That's it. If I lose, I'm in exactly the same boat I'm in today. Heads, I succeed on principle, and lose ~$60k; tails, I fail and I'm still out the ~$60k fee and the time.

It does not resolve the infringement mess

This is the part that should bother you as much as it bothers me: none of this resolves any infringement question.

Consider the absurdity. Their claim is so broad that — if you pretended it were valid — it would reach things that were already public before they started, my own disclosed work among them. A claim that sweeps in the prior art like that is invalid on its face: you can't claim what was already out there — that's the whole point of the PGR. But valid or not, the sheer breadth is its own problem: the very work I disclosed and watched them copy could be waved around as if it were grounds to come after me. That's a huge problem.

All because of sloppy work. Sloppy work by those charged with keeping that gate.

And if I succeed in this PGR and their patent is canceled? We still don't know whether they're infringing mine. The PGR doesn't answer that question. It just removes the cloud over whether I actually have a theoretical right to exclude (remember that exclusive-right bargain the Constitution lets Congress strike). More importantly, there is still confusion in the market. Who actually owns this technology? That damage is already done (and in my opinion, was the entire point of this approach). I should be able to say it's me, I'm the inventor, but now they get to say they have a patent too. That's not fair to the market. The PGR can't unring that bell.

What I'm actually accusing them of

First, what I am not accusing them of: infringement. I have never made that accusation — you can make up your own mind about whether anyone is infringing on anything here. I think it's all pretty obvious what's happening, but no accusations.

What I have accused them of is plagiarism.^† That one is clear, and it's easy to prove — you line up the text and look. Heck, I can show you with a simple Google text search. No claim construction, no dueling experts, no Markman hearing. Just two documents and your own eyes. That's coming in a few posts.

And if they're willing to copy text this blatantly, why wouldn't they copy the idea too? That's the fundamental problem here. The USPTO is so loose with issuing patents — and there's literally no penalty for trying — that copying has become the obvious play at this stage of the US Intellectual Property Game. Just copy. If you get caught, be more careful next time.

That's what this blog is going to show you. Bring your eyes.

Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the earlier time this same idea was good enough to copy.
Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — the earlier, cheaper attempt to head all this off.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — the § 112 ground the examiner never raised, picked up in full.

‡ That $59,375 isn't one line item — it's two stacked on top of each other on the USPTO fee schedule, at the large-entity rate for up to 20 claims: a $25,000 petition request fee just to ask, plus a $34,375 post-institution fee once the Board agrees to look. Add 20 claims and it climbs — each claim over 20 tacks on another $595 to file and $1,315 after institution. Fees change; this reflects the schedule at the time of writing. ↩

† “Plagiarism” isn't a legal term of art — there's no cause of action called “plagiarism” that you file in court. But you all know exactly what I'm getting at: copying someone's text and passing it off as your own. I'm using the word as a plain-English description of a documented fact, not as a legal conclusion. None of this is legal advice or argument. Everything on this site is purely my opinion. That's one constitutional right I should still be entitled to. ↩

I tried to prevent this mess

2026-05-21T12:00:00Z

Two examiners in this story. One read the prior art. The other did not.

Background — this is Dispatch No. 1, the start of a series documenting my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, the patent I believe copies oil-well rotation-sensing I invented and disclosed first. This one is the setup: I tried to stop this before it issued — paid a fee to do it — and was ignored.

If you've read the backstory — the nine-panel version with the soldering iron and the gentleman in the mask — you already know the foundation. A patent application — my patent — became a public blueprint, the blueprint got reworded, and the official record now lists the wrong name. This blog is where I document a hopeful fix: a Post Grant Review (PGR) at the USPTO, and how I believe the system will ultimately fail me (yet again). I am pretty naive to think the system will rise to the occasion, but stranger things have happened. But more importantly, I hope to show how the fee structure is incredibly unfair. It punishes the inventor who took all the right steps and rewards the USPTO for its error.

You should also start by reading my disclaimer on the About Page. This is a story from my perspective and this is all just my opinion. If you find any errors or misstatements, I am happy to correct the record. Heck, if someone wants to do a guest post, I'd be thrilled. Even if it's just to tell me how wrong I am.

No safety valves

Once someone files a patent, what happens next is an entirely subjective process. That process failed me here. It failed because there was no mechanism to correct the record. When you look into this, the "procedural safety valves" are truly insane. None of them address the most common case. And my case is part of a growing problem. It's not just me. You're going to see more and more cases like this because the system is so ineffectual in its current state.

Derivation

What about a Derivation Proceeding? That tool (§ 135) is narrower than it sounds. It's built for one specific fact pattern: you privately conceived the invention, communicated that conception to someone, and they raced to file it as their own without your authorization. The gate is narrow on every edge — you need your own pending application claiming the same or substantially the same invention, and you have to petition within a year of the first publication of the offending claim. My problem doesn't fit any of those edges cleanly: there's no private communication of my conception to point to (they had a published document to read), the one-year window is unforgiving, and the proceeding is really about who-derived-from-whom, not about a bad patent built on a public disclosure. So derivation isn't the vehicle. Maybe one of you fancy lawyers could argue otherwise.

I have another (ongoing) story that almost fits this too (it'll be a while before I get to tell that story… that's the fourth rip-off). It's much closer to a derivation, but I still filed first by a couple of weeks, so derivation doesn't apply. Derivation only applies if you copy and apply first. Not if you copy and apply after. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to matter as you'll see in the main story. This one could still get a patent (and probably will).

Protest

Sounds good, I definitely protest the shenanigans, but the craziest thing is you either need to do it before it publishes or you need the applicant's permission. How the heck would I know someone had copied my work — which is what I'm convinced happened (stay tuned for that part of the story) — before it publishes? And why on earth would I need to get their permission to protest after it publishes?

Examination

It should be abundantly clear I'm not a lawyer, so feel free to point out the nuances and correct me here.

It truly is crazy that all the procedural options only cover incredibly specific corner cases. Not the most blatant and obvious one. The normal examination process is "supposed" to handle that. There's nothing to stop that examination process from going off the rails.

But I don't want to start with the PGR, ex parte, derivation, protest, inadequate examination, etc. Long before that, I found their application and had the simple naive thought, “if the examiner just does half as good a job as the one examining my application, I should be fine.” If the system just worked… This is the part that turns this from “bad luck” into something worth a website.

What happens when a bad patent application gets examined by an inattentive examiner? Let's find out.

Gaming the system

[Sidenote]
But first, if you're not a patent professional, you might not know (or care to know) how this process works. Corporations are gaming the system. That's not unique to this story. There are websites dedicated to ranking examiners. Did you hit the lottery and get an easy examiner? Did you get the whammy and get a hardass? You get to find out reasonably early in the process. It's shocking how subjective this process is. You only need to convince one person you invented something, and there are no safety valves beyond the honor system. How misleading you can be without getting in trouble is truly shocking. I'll provide some very detailed examples.

This gaming of the system is only going to get worse. In 2026, it's trivial for anyone to do an in-depth analysis of an examiner's historical correspondences to profile what types of arguments work and what arguments don't (seriously, AI is really good at this, and you don't even need a fancy third-party tool — it's all sitting right there on the USPTO's site). That capability exists, it's open to anyone, and — to be clear — it's not something I've done to the examiner in my own case. The point is that it isn't invention.
[End Sidenote]

Patents are far too easy to get!

It shouldn't be this difficult to get rid of a bad patent. If you stick with me, I'll show you this is an objectively bad patent.

No one in the patent world will call this out. We all want patents to be easy to get. Even the USPTO (they get those sweet fees). And especially the attorneys who get to extract value from the people trapped in this system. Everyone gets money except the original innovators.

Here's a controversial statement: Patents are far too easy to get! This is only going to get worse as the patent examiners are increasingly outgunned by applicants armed with tools that will easily game the system. And how the fee structure and legal posturing favor more low-quality patents, rather than fewer high-quality patents.

That's not what this post is about, but it should be a cautionary note. This happened before AI tools really hit their stride. If you can do this without the benefit of deep analysis beyond the merits (i.e. by getting into the psychology of the examiner based on historical documents), imagine what you can do now. This story largely unfolded before those tools became widely available.

I paid a fee specifically to help the examiner in their job

Yes, I paid a fee to help the examiner, and that should have avoided all of this grief.

The third-party submission fee. When the other side's reworded application published, I paid the USPTO a fee to put specific prior art documents in front of their examiner. That's the fee that got ignored, and it's the one this post is about.
There are two examiners in this story. (See the header image)
- My examiner had been very thorough on prior art that existed even before my filing date (that's a whole different story for another post).
- Their examiner — the one handling the copied application — was the one who received my submission (and promptly ignored it).

Why couldn't the Office assign the competing application to my examiner, the one who clearly understood the prior art? I suppose that's just a mystery. That's at least part of the way the system got gamed: through unequal examination. Through a roll of the dice. Through dumb luck (and some very misleading statements and a crazy number of typos).

I saw it coming, and I paid to say so

I did not sit back and discover the problem after the fact. I literally did everything I could do, which wasn't much. At an earlier, cheaper, eminently fixable stage, I filed a third-party preissuance submission against their application — the exact tool Congress created for this, under 35 U.S.C. § 122(e) and 37 C.F.R. § 1.290, governed by MPEP § 1134.01. I paid the fee. I thoroughly cited the prior art — including my own published application, the document they'd been reading in the first place. There's a built-in catch to this tool, though: a § 122(e) submission lets you put documents in front of the examiner with a concise description of why each one matters — but it doesn't let you argue the case the way a petition can. You can point; you can't press. That structural limit matters more than it sounds, and it comes back later.

The rule says what's supposed to happen: a compliant submission's documents “will be considered by the examiner and entered into the file as required by 35 U.S.C. 122(e)” (MPEP § 1134.01).

They were “considered” in the narrowest possible sense — entered into the file, a box checked. What I can actually prove from the record is the part that matters most: the submission was never meaningfully applied. Its strongest reference was dropped after the first office action, and the § 102 grounds that did issue were far weaker than what I'd handed them — and didn't hold. Whether their examiner read it closely and shrugged or never truly engaged it, the result on the record is the same — the prior art I paid to put in front of them did no real work, and the patent issued as if it weren't there.

That's the sentence that reframes everything that follows. A PGR is expensive, slow, and adversarial. It is the emergency room. And I'm only in the emergency room because, months earlier, I walked into the clinic, paid the co-pay, handed over a stack of exhaustively documented symptoms, and got waved out the door. Everything's fine here. If their examiner had simply read and properly applied the prior art (that I paid to be considered), there would be no bad patent and no need for any of this.

One caveat, so this lands right: the examiner blew it is why I'm here, not the argument I get to make. A PGR doesn't put the examiner on trial — the Board re-decides the patent's validity from scratch, on the prior art and §§ 101/102/103/112. The examiner's failure is the origin story; the prior art is the case. And here's the other thing a PGR won't do: it can cancel the claims, but it can't sort out the damage done to me and to the integrity of the system.

Why document it publicly

A few people have asked — kindly — why I'd air this instead of quietly grinding through the process with a lawyer. Fair question. Here are some answers:

The mechanics are hidden by design. Almost nobody outside the patent world understands how a published application becomes someone else's patent. It's a growing problem and I can explain it as it happened to me, in plain language. This predatory patenting is something you'll be hearing more and more about.
Sunlight is the only tool I actually have. I'm one inventor. I can't out-spend Big Corp. I can describe, accurately and publicly, what the process is really like, from personal experience. I can illustrate how the flaws get exploited.
Someone else is about to be where I am. If this blog saves one inventor years of frustration, it was worth the effort.
This is bigger than me.
U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 8 — the clause empowering Congress to secure inventors an exclusive right.
This sort of predatory patenting — enthusiastically enabled by the USPTO — is a real and growing problem. If you don't want to pay for technology that is rightly someone else's, you can just manufacture the same basic ownership document, muddy the waters, and confuse the public. They get to say “we have a patent” (which would be perfectly fine if they'd invented something — I don't believe they did). Meanwhile, the original inventor (that's me) no longer gets to claim “the exclusive Right to [my] respective Writings and Discoveries” (in my view, they took both) — this is the bargain that Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 empowers Congress to strike with inventors. Strictly, the clause is a grant of power to Congress, not a personal guarantee — the patent right itself is statutory — but it's the constitutional bargain the whole system is supposed to honor.
Here's the biggest answer. Because I couldn't compete with Big Corp, and couldn't find financial backers with the waters muddied (which, in my opinion, was the point), I had to shelve the development. I had a working prototype — ready for production and expensive industrial certifications. As an inventor, that was painful.

The PTAB is often used as a cudgel to destroy inventors… but I was already destroyed — by what I'd watched the system do to inventors before me.

So here I am: no fair license, a functional prototype on the shelf, and no way to compete (the patent was supposed to be my leverage in the market). There is no pending litigation, which makes this PGR the purest of requests. This patent should never have issued, full stop. That needs to be set straight.

And it is a little embarrassing. I'll say here what I say on the About page: yes, I know I am an idiot for pursuing this. The rational financial move is to eat the loss and move on. I'm not going to. I welcome you to tell me why I'm wrong — the discussion thread is right below.

What's coming

In the dispatches ahead, with receipts where I can share them:

What a Post Grant Review actually is, and why it's the tool that fits this mess.
The third-party preissuance submission in detail — the prior art I cited, and what “considered by the examiner” turned out to mean in practice.
How, as I see it, the applicant bamboozled their way through the system.
The arguments, in human language. So you and I can understand what really happened.
Whatever the Office and the respondent do next. I genuinely don't know how this ends.

If you want to follow along, the cleanest ways are the RSS feed, email (see the home page), or LinkedIn — this is cross-posted there, and you're welcome to argue with me there or in the discussion thread below.

Feedback

Seriously, I welcome feedback, corrections, commentary, or even the occasional anonymous trolling comment.

Thanks for reading Dispatch No. 1. There will be more.

Dispatch No. 4 — The first time this idea was good enough to copy — the earlier, pre-patent episode that first showed this idea was worth copying.
Dispatch No. 6 — The Third-Party Preissuance Submission — where I laid out the prior art this fee was supposed to buy attention for.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — why this same submission tool structurally couldn't raise the strongest ground.
Dispatch No. 29 — Independence Day — where the same Clause 8 constitutional bargain (and this Constitution thumbnail) comes back around.

Post Grant Review — Dispatches

Independence Day

250 years ago

The patent system failed me

The 4th

The Declaration of Independence &The Constitution

Related dispatches

Let's Fix It

Wishful thinking

Not a complete solution

What I'd change

Demand a full and thorough disclosure — § 112

Compounding examination burden

Give third-party submissions real weight

Let the other side speak before issuance

Reward thorough examination

The PTAB and IPR

Registration instead of examination

More thoughts

Related dispatches

TL;DR; They were too long, so I didn't read them

Table of Contents

PGR vs. Other Issues

Getting a patent is easy

How to steal IP

The copying

Mislead the examiner

The one-sided misleading prosecution

Misrepresenting the standard

The typos

Examiner inexperience?

In fairness to the good examiners

The PGR Grounds

§ 102 — Is it new?

§ 103 — Is it obvious?

§ 112 — Did they actually teach it?

Other things

After the damage — no fix, no penalty

Suspicious timing

No safety valve — just a $60,000 door

Why you should believe me

Related dispatches

TL;DR; All the system failures

Table of Contents

Not grounds for a PGR

The system has no shame

Why discuss this here?

It's a lot

No way to respond, in real time

Sloppy examination & proofreading

The examiner never saw a third-party submission

"Considered," not read

Zero § 112 objections

The vibration sensor

Claim 13 got a § 102 and a § 103?

Claim missing allowance restrictions

Misleading the examiner

Misleading standards

"Effectively a compass"

"seemingly contradictory statements"

Broadened claim language

New material in the claim

Amendments without proper markup

Mismatched terms in claims vs. arguments

Misrepresented claim text

Other things

Suspicious timing

No safety valve — just an expensive PGR

What happens to badly examined patents?

Bottom line

Related dispatches

TL;DR; §§ 101, 102, 103, and 112

This is exhausting

§ 101 — Is it even an invention?

§ 102 — Is it new?

§ 103 — Is it obvious?

§ 112 — Did they actually teach it?

Bottom line

Related dispatches

§ 112 — They Never Said How

The Declaration of Independence &
The Constitution