The PGR Petition

Background — part of my pro se Post Grant Review of U.S. Patent 12,460,537, which I believe copies rotation-sensing I disclosed first. This one is the petition itself. New here? Start at Dispatch No. 1.

My time's up

The nine-month PGR window closes on or about August 4, 2026.

Here's the Wayback Machine record proving the petition was finished and public before the window closed. The only reason this isn't on the PTAB docket is the burdensome fee.

Remember, $60k here isn't refunded even if I win. Winning wouldn't award me a dime. It's purely to correct an abundantly obvious error on the part of the USPTO. $60k to right a wrong.

Here it is

The petition and its table of authorities.

Read the petition right here — click to expand

Open as its own page →

Not how I hoped this would go

I knew finding the money was a long shot. The fee was set high to keep folks like me out of the game. I get that. I still hoped that someone in a position to do something would realize how badly the system failed and help right this wrong.

I wish I could afford this. I think I'd have a very good shot at righting this wrong. Undoing what I read as incompetence and shenanigans. I'm not just a whiny inventor — there are real and serious issues here, but the system makes it unreasonably burdensome to address them.

I underestimated how little concern the people with the power to act have for integrity. The emerging predatory patenting problem is hard to understand. It'll take time for this issue to become more obvious. Change doesn't happen overnight. It may be too late for me, but hopefully the next victims will find this site and move this issue forward.

What's in it

§ 102, § 103, § 112(b), § 112(f), § 112(a) I had to cut some of the weaker grounds (I don't think they were weak… but remember the Word Count placed an artificial limitation on what I could argue)

How I generated it

As you can tell, I've leveraged AI extensively. I'm obviously not an attorney, but PGRs are a unique dataset. Four basic statutes, and every document is public. This is a perfect use case for AI. The prompt was roughly: Go read all the PGR petitions and determine what worked and what didn't. Oh, and cram it into 18,700 words. And thoroughly check each citation. No, seriously, cite and link the documents. I didn't just turn the AI loose here. I double-checked it. I corrected it. I spent more time than I care to admit. I don't think it's bad though. Certainly pretty good considering a PGR runs around $300,000 all-in with attorneys.

Feel free to dump on this approach. Law is the one profession I'm rooting for AI to displace. It's getting close… give it another year or two and society will be happy to rid ourselves of attorneys. I welcome your criticism. Show me how an attorney would have done better. Or not just better, but worth the expense… like move-the-needle better.

What's not in it

The applicant's shenanigans, as I read them:

The inept examination:

The fact that an accelerometer is a vibration sensor (ok, that's in there)
The shockingly sloppy examination
The shockingly sloppy allowance

The expert declarations are also missing — I lined up two really great experts, but out of respect, I left their names off. Most of what the declarations would say is visible to anyone who reads the prior art side by side with the claims — but no one files without an expert, and I wouldn't either. Remember, my whole premise is that it really just needed competent examination in the first place.

Anyone have $60,000?

If I had $60,000 (or really the ~$300,000 all-in with attorneys) to blow on this, you'd never see it. The fact that I can't afford justice is the reason I needed to go public with this. The system is broken. This is proof.

What happens now?

I'll likely pivot to an ex parte reexam, where I'll be silenced again. And a reexam reaches only § 102 and § 103, and only on patents and printed publications. It can't raise § 112, and neither can an IPR. The PGR was the only proceeding that could, and its window closes this week.

So the § 112 failures in the claims as issued — a patent that never said how, which I think is the worst of it — will never be examined. No proceeding I can start at the USPTO (after today) can raise a § 112 challenge. A court could — but only if somebody puts it there: an infringement suit (e.g., if they sue me for infringing their patent that I believe they copied from me), or a declaratory-judgment action, which takes a real, immediate dispute to get through the courthouse door. Whether they'd ever sue me, I can't know. As I see it, a patent like this earns its keep just by existing — muddying who invented what, and serving as a reason to never sit down and license the technology from the person who actually disclosed it. A patent used that way rarely sees a courtroom, so its § 112 defects may never see one either. The examiner didn't raise them, and now maybe nobody who can raise them ever will.

The bright side…?

Perhaps in an ex parte reexam the patent owner will make fewer of the statements I read as misrepresentations, and maybe the examiner will be more diligent and competent. But let's face it, the USPTO isn't in the business of not collecting fees. The patent owner will probably amend it — and substantively amended claims trigger intervening rights, which is its own kind of win — but they'll still get to say they have a patent on something they didn't even disclose.

No stats recorded

Like the town with low crime stats, these issues will go unrecorded because I can't afford to report them, and the USPTO will continue on with business as usual.

The harm to me is that this patent goes on existing while adding nothing new.

Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Dispatch No. 2 — Why a PGR? — why this should have been the real remedy, and what it costs.
Dispatch No. 5 — Where have I heard this before? — the plagiarism, which no ground in the petition reaches.
Dispatch No. 8 — Back From the Dead — the sloppy examination that produced the patent this petition attacks.
Dispatch No. 9 — The Overly Broad Claim Slipped Through — the allowance that let the overly broad claim through.
Dispatch No. 12 — A Private Conversation, Held in Public — the misrepresentations of my disclosure, left out of the petition.
Dispatch No. 16 — Claim 13 — Again — the claim-13 mismatch, another thing a merits petition can't carry.
Dispatch No. 17 — Let's Ask Claude — the earlier AI pass over the record; this petition is that approach at full length.
Dispatch No. 22 — § 102 — Nothing New Here — the anticipation case, pleaded here as Ground 2.
Dispatch No. 23 — § 103 — Obvious to Anyone in the Field — the obviousness case the petition leads with.
Dispatch No. 24 — § 112 — They Never Said How — the ground that dies with this window and never gets examined.
Dispatch No. 25 — TL;DR; §§ 101, 102, 103, and 112 — the short version of the grounds.
Dispatch No. 26 — TL;DR; All the system failures — the failures the petition can't put in front of anybody.
Dispatch No. 28 — Let's Fix It — the fixes that would have made this fileable.
Dispatch No. 31 — Word Count — the 18,700-word cap this petition had to fit inside.
Dispatch No. 32 — Crime Statistics — the $60,000 toll, and the complaint that never gets counted.