The ideas contained in the application would blossom at Apple, Google, Microsoft, Nuance, Vlingo and dozens of other companies. All the while, the application traveled quietly through the patent office, where officials rejected it twice in 2007, three times in 2008, once in 2009, twice in 2010 and once in 2011.
The patent office has a reputation for being overworked, understaffed and plagued by employee turnover, and employees concede that some of their work is subjective.
“When I get an application, I basically have two days to research and write a 10- to 20-page term paper on why I think it should be approved or rejected,” said Robert Budens, a 22-year patent examiner and president of the examiners’ labor union. “I’m not going to pretend like we get it right every time.”
To receive a patent, an invention must be novel (substantially different from what exists), not obvious (one can’t patent a new toaster simply by expanding it to handle five slices of bread), and useful (so
meone can’t patent an invisibility machine if invisibility is impossible).
“If you give the same application to 10 different examiners, you’ll get 10 different results,” said Raymond Persino, a patent lawyer who worked as an examiner from 1998 to 2005.
After patent 8,086,604 was first rejected in 2007, Apple’s lawyers made small adjustments to the application, changing the word “documents” to “items of information” and inserting the phrase “heuristic modules” to refer to bits of software code. A few years later, the inclusion of the word “predetermined” further narrowed Apple’s approach.
These changes had little substantial impact, said experts who reviewed the application for The Times. But the patent office slowly began to come around to Apple’s point of view.
