From the patent application's detailed description:
"[0012] The inventor and the assignee of this patent [Halliburton Energy Services, Inc.] have no intention of applying the techniques described herein offensively but instead intend to use the patent defensively to discourage patent trolls and the like from extortionist practices."
(Disclosure: The attorney of record is a friend of mine.)
I'm happy to see the word trolls embedded in a legal document.
But the claims remind me why patents tend to be useless to actual innovation "The method of claim 63 where filing the claim with the patent office includes:filing the claim with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. " -- not only is that obvious, but it's repeated several times. (I'm sure these guys write better patents than I do, I just hate the metric that we use for "better")
Well, if you have years of effort put into something which can be copied easily, as is the case with mechanical inventions, drugs, or cryptography/compression algos (yes I think those actually make sense as patentable), that's one thing. Most software is the opposite -- copying it and applying to your business would often be more effort than inventing your own. So the patent system is exactly backwards for us.
Bruce Schneier has written that patents are useless for cryptography. You can't trust an algorithm until a lot of cryptographers have beaten on it, and they don't bother with patented algorithms. Patenting your algorithm just dooms it to obscurity.
Later claims add specifics. The patent office is general and can clearly refer to any patent office (WIPO, EPO one of the OAPI offices, etc.) whilst this claim is specifically for inventions before the USPTO.
Why do that? Well if there's prior art that knock out the antecedent claims but doesn't include this specificity then you still get a patent. Also for infringement purposes I think more damages can be extracted for things which are specifically claimed as opposed to generally claimed (depends on jurisdiction). Finally it helps prevent someone else from getting an addon to your invention patented - "our invention is the anti-patent invention but with the innovation of doing this before the USPTO, were awesome like that".
I don't see how claim structure like this has any bearing on innovation?
"[0012] The inventor and the assignee of this patent [Halliburton Energy Services, Inc.] have no intention of applying the techniques described herein offensively but instead intend to use the patent defensively to discourage patent trolls and the like from extortionist practices."
(Disclosure: The attorney of record is a friend of mine.)