Patent Office Shows Record Backlog

acroyear writes "WTOP, 1500am, a news radio station in the DC area, is reporting that the Patent Office Is Seeing Record Backlog, with 2 years for a patent now, and potentially 4 years to wait by decade's end, and the PTO is considering a 15% increase in filing fees. Personally, I think if they had set a trend of actually rejecting patents that don't belong, they'd have sent enough of a message to keep application numbers to a reasonable level; right now, everybody files because just about everything can get one."

Comments

Throwing money at this will not solve the problem.

[SLASHDOT EDlTOR]

Infrasctucture overhauls and their willingness to revamp the system are key to sucess. I am afraid that in typical government fashion the backlog will be resolved with a shredder. Only time will tell.

Yeah...

[CrazyDuke]

Yeah, and us poor schmucks who can't afford several grand in expences have to get a corporation to help and hope they don't screw us. Too bad I can't make any money off of these ideas I have. Innovation my ass.

Re:Yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

Patents are meant to protect actual entrepeneurs, not just people that sit around in their parents' basement and "invent things". Once upon a time, the Patent Office required an actual working prototype instead of just Powerpoint slides.

If you're one of those guys that likes to file a zillion applications for vague ideas and then hope to sue someone else that actually produces an independent product ten years later, I have no sympathy for you. You could at least look on your few grand as an investment in your extortion scheme.

And if you have a useful idea and can actually put it into production, you'll need to start a company. A few grand for a patent application is peanuts compared to the cost of actually making anything out of some idea. Very often, the idea itself isn't actually the important part; the execution is.

Assumptions

[RealityMogul]

everybody files because just about everything can get one

Now we've all seen plenty of stories where stupid patents have been granted. But I don't think we're getting the entire picture. If they grant thousands of patents a year and we only see 20 stupid patent articles, then maybe they aren't doing the terrible job we're assuming they are. Maybe they are rejecting patents but we just don't hear about it because companies don't publicize their rejections.

I'm not claiming to have first-hand knowledge of the USPO but it's food for thought.

Re:Assumptions

[mrjive]

But the fact that it is used across the country is why they patented it in the first place.

Re:Assumptions

[Jerf]

Actually it's probably patent-worthy. Most physical things are nowadays.

As long as the patent laws are being followed correctly, and the patent on those bags is not considered to be a patent on the entire concept of plastic bags, as software patents often are, there's nothing wrong. The idea of "plastic bags" is not patent worthy, but creating a bag that is cheap, strong, easy to manufacture, and generably usable is a challenge, and once someone puts in the effort to find a solution, they deserve the reward of first rights to market it.

You'd be surprised at how much engineering goes into even the simplest of physical objects nowadays. One of my canonical examples is the turn signal stick; conceptually quite simple, but to make a cost-effective turn signal stick that is reliable over the lifetime of the car, which may used literally hundreds of thousands or millions of times, in a huge array of environmental conditions, with several controls on the stick ('toggle', up, down, often cruise control controls are placed on there), and which needs to be reliable (it's borderline life-or-death if it malfunctions badly enough; I nearly got whacked just two days ago by a car with its right turn signal on that was slowing down when it didn't mean to turn right; if it was on because it failed to reset correctly after a right turn the failure of the turn signal stick could have put me in the hospital), is quite difficult. As long as the patent office is just protecting that exact stick, the patents are OK in my book. It's not until they start granting a "patent" on the whole idea of a toggling stick that we start having trouble.

The converse?

[cybermace5]

We are so quick to rush to judgement. Perhaps even reversing cause and effect?

Maybe the frivolous patents are a result of everyone bum-rushing the Patent Office. There might not be enough time to scrutinize every patent that comes in. Of course this encourages more frivolous patents, making it even harder for the Patent Office to give each patent its due care.

It's an interesting tactic: flood the Patent Office with useless requests, making it impossible for individuals to get their life's work patented. The longer an invention remains unpatented, the better chance of duplicating and marketing someone's idea before they have the chance (because you have all the production capabilities already). Vague patents and lawyers can keep away those who decide to challenge, and most will probably accept a small settlement.

Fee Schedule

[WPIDalamar]

I think the way fees are done for the patent office should be changed. Something that rewards good patents, and penalizes bad ones.

$patentCost = (some constant);

while( patentIsRejected() )
{
$patentCost *= 2;
}

And then we need to reimplement patentIsRejected() to something like:

1) flat-out-reject anything that's already patented.
2) reject anything with prior art
3) Have a QUALIFIED examiner spend some time looking it over.
4) Have a certain public review periond (6 months?) that anyone can register complaints
5) Review complaints (possible reject)
6) Have another, different qualified examiner check it out for an extended period of time.

Abolish?

[rarewire]

I think there should be a study to determine how harmful it will be for the society if we move to abolish the patent system altogether. I have doubts whether the benefits of having the current system can outweigh the disadvantages like the chilling effect on innovations coming from individual or small company sources.

Re:Alternative

[deander2]

> Why should we make the USPTO due the homework of a patent lawyer?

because thats what they were CHARTERED to do. you want randomly hired patent lawyers deciding for themselves that their clients deserve government granted monopolies?

> Another way to filter patents (and lower taxpayer burden) is to leave it up to the courts.

you think trials are free? using the courts to invalidate patents costs much MORE than only granting valid patents in the first place. for everyone, the taxpayer AND the two companies.

> To prevent abuses, there should be strong penalties for filing a patent that gets overturned in court.
increased risk means decreased value. a company should not have to bear the risk of fines later in life if a patent is overturned. the patent fees should cover the cost of evaluation, and if they're not valid they should not be granted, end of story.

> Useless patents are never challenged and nobody cares; useful patents get their due. Lawyers make more money.

maybe they aren't challenged, but they ARE used for bullying smaller companies. heck, they're used to bully companies of all sizes. no, not everyone is happy.

The extremely sad thing

[Anonymous Coward]

the extremely sad thing is that then economy is so bad for process engineers with little experience that I'm actually appyling to get a job there.

Pay is very good, work from what I heard is a typical government job. People have certain quotas, and they make them and dont try any harder because of lack of competetiveness within the USPTO.

So let me see if I have this straight...

[bittmann]

From the article:


Last year the office issued an average of more than 3,000 patents a week. It is one of the few federal agencies that brings in more money than it spends.

Some of that money is siphoned off to other agencies _ more than $630 million since 1992.


The Patent Office has a positive cash flow. They actually take in more in fees than they consume, with the excess being diverted to non-productive (from a patent standpoint, anyway) agencies.

So, *of course* the only way for them to process more patents per time unit is to raise the fees.

Yes, I do realize that there are most likely mitigating factors (dealing with problems of expansion, etc.) that come in to play, here, which would make a noticable jump in speed more expensive. But, initial inspection of the problem does tend to make me think "plow the profits back in to the organization. Make *more* profits that way. Remember: The more we process, the more we *generate* here..."

Or could it possibly be an idea of "raise the fee enough to drive off all of these pesky little inventors...thus reducing our workload."

Nah...they wouldn't think that way...would they?

Re:So let me see if I have this straight...

[mabhatter654]

Yeah, but it creates an interesting effect.

1. siphon funds from PTO
2. PTO is overworked, big corps push bad apps thru.
3. increase fee for "better" service
4. Smaller fries can't afford anymore [oops that's a bad thing]
5. Profit from increased PTO fees, campaign contributions and corp taxes!

the problem is that to a corp like IBM $5K is peanuts! To you or I, it's a new car! Cheap patents are one of the key catalysts for our free market economy. Anyone can startup, get the feds protection to keep everyone playing fair. Without it, what's left of a free market will be carved up by corps that agree on standard contracts that force us to give them everything! You won't have a choice because they'll all be in on it, they'll have killed off all the new blood in the system!

On a side note, I've never understood why Corps aren't considered governments. They are created with charters, not actual property, and the people that run them don't own them usually [stockholders running by proxy CEO is a govt thing, not a property right] That could fix a lot of things if corps had to follow the constitutional provistions of our rights just like a govt!

Record Patents

[Stargoat]

Individual efficiency in the workplace has been geometrically rising for the past century and a half. Population has also been geometrically rising dramatically for the past century and a half. Therefore, the number of patent requests also be geometrically rising. Since government bureaucracies tend to be sticky in their use of technologies, it shouldn't be any surprise that there are a record number of patents applications with a large backlog.

Increasing fees is the anti-solution

[ItWasThem]

The PTO is considering a 15% increase in filing fees.

Yeah that's the solution... let's make it even harder for the average joe to submit a patent... that's the problem. Those damn garage hobbyists doing nothing but submitting applications. The nerve. It couldn't be the corporations who don't care how much you charge and submit hundreds of applications a month...

Most Patents are Useful

[raehl]

I'm fairly involved in the paintball industry, and I've had occasion due to 10% need and 90% need to procrastinate to read/skim the vast majority of patents related to paintball.

99% of them patent something useful in the industry. Maybe the USPTO drops the ball more often when it comes to software, but there's still a lot of patenting that goes on out there for just regular old "stuff"; genuine, true inventions. Even if you DID manage to find a way to prevent the frivolous patents from getting there in the first place, they're probably less than 5% of the total workload. Maybe 1 or 2%. Because patents are freaking expensive.

Just keep in mind that the way Slashdot "News" articles can make the world look (Many events happen twice! ;)) may not necessarily be the way the world really is. I'm willing to bet that the backlog is 98% due to growth of the economy/country rapidly exceeding growth of staff at the USPTO.

Patent Office Woes

[porslap]

IEEE Spectrum magazine's Invention Department has been covering the patent backlog for the last few months, and the PTO's plans to do something about it. It's a matter of personnel--you have 3400 examiners looking at over 400 000 patents currently pending, with maybe a quarter million new ones coming in over the transom every year. The bloat of business method patents and software patents is particularly crippling, and the PTO's plan to out source prior art searches isn't going to solve the problem. David Kushner (author of the new Masters of Doom book on Romero and Carmack) visited the PTO to see what was going on in February. Scott Kariya wrote a piece on the proposed reforms in December 2002. Read on at:

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemp la te.jsp?ArticleId=i040203

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/careers/careerstemp la te.jsp?ArticleId=i120202