Эксперт патентного ведомства: роль и обязанности

Civil servant working in a patent office
A patent examiner (or, historically, a patent clerk) is an employee, usually a civil servant with a scientific or engineering background, working at a patent office.

Patent examiners review patent applications to determine whether the invention(s) claimed in each of them should be granted a patent or whether the application should instead be refused. One of the most important tasks of a patent examiner is to review the disclosure in the application and to compare it to the prior art. This involves reading and understanding a patent application, searching the prior art (including prior patent applications and patents, scientific literature databases, etc.) to determine what contribution the invention makes over the prior art, and issuing office actions to explain to the applicants and their representatives (i. e., patent attorneys or agents) any objections that may exist against the grant of a patent. In other words, an examiner reviews a patent application substantively to determine whether it complies with the legal requirements for granting of a patent. A claimed invention must meet patentability requirements of novelty, inventive step or non obviousness, industrial application (or utility) and sufficiency of disclosure. Examiners are expected to be efficient in their work and to determine patentability within a limited amount of time. Some patent applications are easy for an examiner to assess, but others require considerably more time. This has given rise to controversy: On April 13, 2007, a "Coalition of Patent Examiner Representatives" expressed concern that

NameBirth yearDeath yearDescriptionGenrich Altshuller19261998a Soviet engineer, inventor, scientist, journalist and writer. Clara Barton18211912worked at the United States Patent Office (Currently the USPTO)Albert Einstein18791955worked at the Swiss Federal Office for Intellectual Property (now known as the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property)Thomas Jefferson17431826first patent examiner of the U. S. Patent OfficeArthur Paul Pedrick? (>1918)1976UK Patent Office examiner and prolific inventorHenry E. Baker18571928The first person to record the work of Black American inventors, Henry E. Baker Jr. entered the U. S. Naval Academy in 1874 as only the third Black person to ever attend. He later became Second Assistant at the U. S. patent office and published several works on Black inventors and their societal contributions.