What is interference?
Interference is a metaphor. And it is a misleading one. Everyone knows that waves don’t actually interfere with one another. How do we know this? Try talking while someone else is talking. Your sound waves don’t garble the other person’s. Both sets of sound waves arrive intact. Of course, it can be hard to understand what either person is saying. But that’s not because the sound waves have been deformed the way talking through a pillow or a kazoo deforms the them. Instead, the problem is with our “software’s” inability to interpret the sound waves. Likewise with radio waves. The garbling of signal that prevents good reception isn’t due to interference but to the inability of the receiver to separate signal from noise. But modern receivers are far better able to do that. As a result, we no longer need a federal policy that is the equivalent of licensing only one person to talk at a time.
Interference is the process initiated by the USPTO in order to establish the veracity of the different claims as well as determine the ‘first inventor’, when two or more applications filed by different inventors stake claim to the same invention. Interference proceedings may also be instituted between an application and a patent already issued, provided that the patent has not been issued, nor the application been published, for more than one year prior to the filing of the conflicting application, and provided also that the conflicting application is not barred from being patentable for some other reason.
