“Black sheep” in the patent family

Some people are known as the “black sheep” of their families – people whose undesirable or disreputable lifestyle and bad behavior disrupts normal family relationships. Patent families can also have “black sheep”, and like the “black sheep” of a human family they can disrupt a patent family in many ways – with missing or incorrect claims for priority, multiple priorities, ambiguous data formats or typographical errors. Disruptions in patent families can result from aggressive patenting strategies, but they can also be caused by bad behavior that is not the fault of the patent or patentee, such as data transcription errors, variations in national patent issuing procedures or inconsistent treatment by databases.