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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."
I work for a large corporation, and they encourage every employee to try to create 4 patent proposals a year. Coworkers have submitted many proposals, but I don't know in my local group who's gotten a patent all the way through... I don't konw how much rubber-stamping the USPTO is doing given that our legal department is rejecting 90%+ of our submissions.
That way, the filing fees can remain low, but valuable patents (which in theory may require more protection) will pay the government for that protection. Something like 1% of profits on the invention. So, a million dollar idea would get the government $10,000 in exchange for the patent protection. If your idea never makes you money (say over $1000), then you don't need to pay it.
e. If they grant thousands of patents a year and we only see 20 stupid patent articles
u s_stat.pdf the US Govt granted 166,000 patents in 2001. It's quite amazing how many they have to go through.
According to this http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/
Photos.
If you submit an excessive amount of 'frivolous patents you should get fined... a lot, or even better, your patents get reviewed with a lower priority until the 'quality' of the patents goes back up.
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.
I have an idea I'm working on, hoping to get to the filing point within the end of the year. After building the prototype, I'll be out close to a grand. After filing, I'm looking at investing almost $8K on this idea. With only the hope that it will work.
It is a major setback for inventors and entrepeneurs, as it gets rather difficult to do this without some decent backing. Luckily, I have a few people who like my idea and will be helping out after I show the prototype.
It still is difficult to do, more so than it should. What I would like to see is that your first patent sets (for a specific project, limit to) should be provided free, then additional patents for a seperate project should be very expensive. You get a good, easy one shot for a good idea, and if it sucks, it's hard to do it the second time.
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.
To bring any idea to fruitation, you should look towards spending upwards of $10K. The sad part is, most of this is filing fees and seldom goes into building the actual device. After the prototype I can contract to a firm to make the devices for probably $100 a piece, and marketing will bring it to $150 (Or less, if I sell over ebay...) and I can easily make $50 profit on each item, assuming they sell.
So, I have to sell approximately 100 before I even cover the filing fees. Great fucking deal.
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
People need to understand that the USPTO is a cash cow for the Feds. It made somewhere along the lines of 400 million dollars for the Feds in 2002.
It has done that, in part, by actively encouraging the general public to file for both patent and trademark applications. It has implied to the public that it is easy to go through the application process. It also has a lopsided bonus structure for examiners that encourages quantity, not quality. While I was a trademark examiner, I could have made up to $20,000 per year in bonuses for the quantity of my work, but only about $3,000 dollars for the quality of my work. Does that make any sense if you do not want stupid patents and trademarks being issued!?!
The USPTO has implemented a new strategic plan that will restructure how the PTO handles both patent and trademark applications. Most people in the field believe that this restructuring will increase pendency and decrease quality. You can read the PTO's annual reports and the 21st Century Strategic Plan"
So it should be no surprise that filings are going way up and pendency is going way up along with it... and that more mistakes are made and more garbage gets through. It also should come as no surprise that the PTO has a vested interest in making sure people believe that they can file applications on their own. So it offers "online filing", "online searching" and other tools that are really a poor substitute for having a complete search done by an attorney (or a patent agent). There is no question that some people don't want to put out the money for a professional search, and are willing to chance the money they lose in filing fees. That's fine. There are also those who earnestly get the impression that all they have to do is "file an application" and they will get a registration. Like most things in life (and especially with the government), it rarely works that way.
-A