Be wayyy more strict about what can be submitted. Limit patent claims to one page, authored by the main inventor (not her lawyer), reject wayy more submissions, allow the public to identify prior art on pending patents, etc.
Wouldn't that force people to be vague? More pages would mean more specificity, wouldn't it? A patent can currently only cover one thing anyway, and even if this wasn't the case then people would just submit many one-page patents instead of a 100-page collection of 100 smaller patents.
>not her lawyer
Can I ask why you specified her? I am all for gender equality and am currently trying to get into the habit of using "them" and "theirs" instead of "him" and "his" but switching to the opposite gender doesn't seem to solve anything. Plus it reads oddly because the male is gender-neutral in English, swapping it with a word that is not gender-neutral is confusing.
As for the former portion, I think the goal here is to force the applicant to be as succinct as possible to make the review process faster. I think you're right in that it would result in a larger number of patents, and there are certainly patents that couldn't fit on a single page without omitting a valuable prelude. For example, an algorithm patent may require some initial exposition to delineate the novelty of the idea.
The latter portion of your comment is not necessary and does not contribute to the discussion at hand. There are many possible reasons for using "her" instead of "him" and the majority of them are valid.
Actually, "its" would be gender-neutral in English, but using "its" to describe a person is considered very rude (because people actually have genders, so "its" implies that you are talking about something rather than someone).
Something to consider: Would you have had the same reaction to this sentence: "...a nurse (not her lawyer)...?" Many people would find that to be less "forced" because they are already comfortable assuming that nurses are women. In other words, the fact that using one pronoun stands out more than using another is evidence of a bias people carry (not necessarily you -- maybe you would have been equally curious if it was, "not his lawyer"; that would make you a very unique person ;) ).
I believe that is because English grammar is in a transitional stage right now as we lose declensions for our pronouns. In a century or two, "they" might be the proper genderless pronoun, and we may not even have gendered pronouns at that point -- but that is not the English of today. So while using "they" as a genderless singular pronoun might sometimes work it still feels a bit awkward.
Personally, I try to alternate between "he" and "she" when I am talking about hypothetical people, so I am never pushing the bounds of English grammar (at least with pronouns).
'He' and 'she' switching confuses me, and while in some cases I do feel that it's a result of actual ambiguity, a big part of it might just be unfamiliarity.
Either way, even in Dutch I find myself to be a bit more sensitive to these things and it's not something I'd argue against. Although in Dutch there's not even a 'they' we can use, practically.
The key is to keep the price of filing the same. So when you have a $20k budget for patenting, you will still only file the same number of patents. Then the one-pager will have to be succinct and to the point. If it doesn't convince the examiner that it's novel, the patent gets rejected and the application fees are wasted. Most patents today are just legalese with a zillion combinations of embodiments of the main claims. Just keep it to the claims and be specific.
It's pretty common in Britain, and yes it's valid grammatically correct English but it's used to refer to "oneself" so wouldn't work when referring to others very well.
