Around the turn of the century, several financial analyst types came up with a way to analyze the pricing of financial services to account for all the costs of selling the service. The basic invention allows a provider (say, an insurance company) to determine the transactional costs at each step of the transaction, such as commissions and bonuses to brokers, actuarial risks, and the risks of policy riders, and to graphically illustrate those costs on a ‘waterfall.’ A waterfall is a simple two-dimensional graph that indicates sequential changes to a starting value in a stepwise manner, similar to a bar graph. The provider could then review the waterfall graph and identify and plug revenue leaks.
So the invention uses a conventional computer to collect data and to graphically present the data. That’s all.
G.E. Financial Assurance Holdings* apparently found the invention so valuable that it filed both U.S. and international patent applications, starting, oh, back in 2001. In those days, it was still possible to patent business methods and still possible to patent software. But then the law changed when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Bilski decision, largely eliminating patents for business methods, and the Alice v CLS Bank and related decisions largely eliminating patents for most computer software, both on grounds that they are ‘abstract ideas.’
G.E. Financial’s application appears to fail the ‘abstract idea’ tests developed under those and other recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions, which is what the patent examiners concluded.
It’s now 23 years later, and G.E. Financial’s U.S. patent application is still pending. And it’s not for lack of trying by the USPTO. The USPTO has rejected the application a total of 32 times, with 17 non-final rejections and 15 final rejections. So how did G.E. Financial achieve such an impressive number of rejections? By paying for them. Since the first final rejection back in 2008, G.E. Financial has filed a total of 14 ‘requests for continued examination’ (RCE), each with a new filing fee, and each of which buys two more reviews by a USPTO examiner.
At least since 2017, when G.E. Financial lost an appeal to the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (which G.E. Financial apparently did not further appeal), it must be clear to G.E. Financial that this application will never result in an issued patent.
Plus, patents only have a life of 20 years from the date of first application, and it’s now more than 20 years after the first application. As pointed out by Dennis Crouch, if a hypothetical patent to G.E. Financial would have any life at all, it would only be for a few years, and that is due to the USPTO’s initial delay in reviewing the application.
So why does G.E. Financial continue to throw money out the window with one RCE after another? That is a mystery, but this author can only speculate that maintaining ‘patent pending’ status is valuable to G.E. Financial, perhaps due to some decades-old contract term that conveys value to G.E. Financial as long as the application is pending.
In the meantime, this and a few other ‘zombie’ patent applications that can never result in issued patents continue to soak up examiner resources to no useful end.
*For reasons unknown to this author, G.E. Financial Assurance Holdings’ fingerprints are nowhere to be found on the U.S. patent application, but do appear on the international application.
— Robert Yarbrough, Esq.