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The Real Problem With the US Patent System

Posted by Zonk on from the slow-down-man-what's-the-rush dept.

Pachooka-san writes "An article in the Washington Post touches on the 'real' patent problem — the quotas that Patent Examiners must meet. They have no effective quality standards, only production standards, so many applications get only cursory review just so the PE can keep up the grueling pace. The USPTO is the only government agency that can and does lay you off if your productivity drops below 85% of the standard for your civil service grade. A Primary PE has to process 5 new and 5 old applications every 2 weeks (that's 8 hours each, folks). The best part — that 28-box application mentioned in the article? — it gets the PE the same credit as the smallest application. How many of those 28 boxes do you think even got opened?"

2 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Patents are very difficult to read by Actually,+I+do+RTFA · · Score: 5, Informative

    Surely it would help matters enormously if patents had to be written in English rather than impenetrable legalese?

    Patents are legal documents. That is why they are written in legalese. And patent examiners speak legalese. It actually makes them more efficent as it becomes easier to reject a patent for prior art the fewer ways there are to express an idea.

    And legalese, much like medical jargon, is a seperate language where words mean specific things. Unfortunately, while medicine stole from Latin, and is thus obvious, the Law stole from English. So many people think it is merely poor English, when in reality the words being used have very precise meanings.

    IANAL

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  2. Re:Reverse the polarity! by droe42 · · Score: 5, Informative

    The system already rewards examiners for denying an application. (They get a count regardless how they dispose of the application.) Come Nov. 1st the rules for patenting are going to change dramatically. A lot of the complaints out there are getting addressed (for better or worse) by the rule changes. Everyone wants to see "obvious" patents rejected, unless you are the guy who came up with them. This is the *clarification* of the rule changes: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/dapp/opla/preognotice/clmcontclarification.pdf If only I had patented the spreadsheet....