Loren writes about Microsoft General Counsel Brad Smith’s talk of patent reform (covered here and here). A line in Loren’s post caught my eye:

“it's not the patent fee that's the big issue. You'll still need legal assistance writing and filing the patent.”

Ever since my dot-com experiences, which included me signing over a really, really great idea for $1 and then dealing with an idiot lawyer who introduced all sorts of inaccuracies into the text (and then the company went bankrupt with the patent needing revisions. I still have no idea of the status of the IP…), I’ve questioned the idea that “patent-ese” is impenetrable. I mean, yeah, it’s not English, but we’re programmers.  We’re used to baroque syntax with arcane tangents. Hell, we like that stuff.

Plus, we’ve got examples up for free at uspto.gov. I mean, let other people pay for the examples of patent-ese and just reverse engineer it. Instead of paying a patent lawyer to do the translation, just pay one to review your draft.