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The U.S. Patent Backlog
coondoggie writes "Even with its increased hiring estimates of 1,200 patent examiners each year for the next 5 years, the US Patent and Trademark Office patent application backlog is expected to increase to over 1.3 million at the end of fiscal year 2011 the Government Accounting Office reported today. The USPTO has also estimated that if it were able to hire 2,000 patent examiners per year in fiscal year 2007 and each of the next 5 years, the backlog would continue to increase by about 260,000 applications, to 953,643 at the end of fiscal year 2011, the GAO said. Despite its recent increases in hiring, the agency has acknowledged that it cannot hire its way out of the backlog and is now focused on slowing the growth of the backlog instead of reducing it. This too is but one of the goals of the Patent Reform Act currently making the rounds in the US Senate."
I hereby submit a patent to use computing and human resources technology to increase the speed of the patent process.
Pay me, bitches.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I wonder how many of those are (potentially prior art) software patents?
As a graduating computer engineer, I've been interviewing around, and USPTO was one of the places. Here's what they shared with me-
They are currently backlogged 5 years.
With their hiring surge of engineers, they want to bring the backlog to 2 years within 4 years IIRC
And apparently they crap money, with a starting salary of 63k with a 10k starting bonus for the first 4 years, plus a 10% bonus if a 130% efficiency rating is maintained for the 4 quarters.
The ones they are particularly hiring are EEs, CSs, and Comp Engs.
Now you know, and remember- Knowledge is power!
Live life to the fullest. It's not that life is short, but that you are dead for so long.
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/10/18/2036215
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/07/AR2007100701199_pf.html
1.3 million backlogged patents at what say $400.00 each is 400 Million dollars. I think the problem is solved simply hire additional patent examiners and pay them the 400 Million dollars that the people paid to have them examined. It might help with unemployment.
"an infinite player that has lost his finite mind" ~Infinite Play the Movie (it blends with reality)
I think examiners encourage the use of big words in a patent, not so that the patent is unique, but so they can claim ignorance when someone re-patents something in existence. If an investigation comes up then the patent examiner can claim ignorance. A lot of that techno-bable doesn't makes any sense to someone in the field.
God spoke to me.
I have an application 12 months into a 30 month queue. In a fast-moving field, this is a huge headache. My previous patents only took about a year to get to first office action.
There's a new express program, though. If you file no more than three claims, file online, and do a more diligent search, the USPTO promises to process the patent in less than a year. That was just starting when I filed, and I didn't take that option.
"Just rubber stamp it. The judicial branch will sort it out for us."
Is that what it's going to come down too?
Life is not for the lazy.
It seems to me that the demand for patent examiners and the explosion of patent applications and money derived from them should add up to a lot bigger hire than just a few thousand more examiners. The PTO should charge an annual fee on patents that's a tiny percent of the revenue from their applications or licensing, which if enough to pay for enough examiners should still be under 1% of income under the patents. Then the amount of examiners will keep pace with the growth in the patents they have to examine.
:).
In fact, the growth in patents and their revenue should even stimulate the production of American engineers. Offer full scholarships to engineers, funded by those fees, in exchange for them becoming paid examiners for a couple-few years at least, and returning for at least 6 months every 5-10 years for a couple-few decades. If they break that deal, they owe 2x their scholarship immediately, which can pay for more scholarships and paid examiners.
The patent system has many problems. Primary is that the American people subsidize the creation of intellectual property by paying for the expensive examination and challenge system, which we can ill afford with our current budget problems (and which was never fair to the public, anyway). Also too few examiners of too little quality and commitment. Calibrating a fee to hire examiners and create them by scholarship to the volume of applications should make the system more self-regulating. And good for engineers: Albert Einstein had most of his good ideas working in the Swiss patent office, which no doubt benefited from his talent and imagination. Let's see America protect both itself and its inventors with a simple device that balances both.
You may consider this design to be placed in the public domain
--
make install -not war
How about regional processing centers around the county (if they really are paying engineers 65K/year that goes along way in the midwest but not far in DC area). I would be happy to process patents in my technical field from home, with the proper training and tools prior art and patent serching. Let the academics, engineers, comptuer sci/e people get trained and process patentent part time from home!
I think in this difficult time for our government all patriotic Americans should refrain from inventing stuff for the next five years.
I patent the "One-click" patent approval process.
I'll license it back to them for a fee.
Slashdotter, ID #101. UIDs are in binary, right?
Honestly, taking any existing patent and tossing it on the internet should be tossed immediately as obvious.
Knock out software patents, and patents on processes, and blamo! problem solved.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs
Far easier...
Deny any patent with the words, "A method to..."
Problem solved. I bet the backlog drops by at least 3/4 what it is today.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
I could help post bogus patents so the stupid system finally breaks and you can introduce something sensible in its place.
I have filed a few patents before.. so I know how much their pinch hurts in the wallet. What we basically have here is a governmental cash cow. I want this sort of problem with my side business. Too many customers to deal with!? If they start outsourcing to india, this kind of surplus could generate more revenue than oil. If anything I think they should be trying to INCREASE the growth of patent submissions, to better provide for the future generation of america. If you think of the children, it becomes obvious that there is a lot to gain here.
They actually *read* patent applications?!?
I have filed a few patents before.. so I know how much their pinch hurts in the wallet.
What we basically have here is a governmental cash cow.
I want this sort of problem with my side business. Too many customers to deal with!?
If they start outsourcing to india, this kind of surplus could generate more revenue than oil.
If anything I think they should be trying to INCREASE the growth of patent submissions, to better provide for the future generation of america.
If you think of the children, it becomes obvious that there is a lot to gain here.
( repost for readibility =/ )
You'd think that if we have patents like this out there, the patent office must not be spending that much time on patents...and yet, somehow we still have a growing backlog. Go figure.
Either they're spending a lot of time doing nothing and breezing through patents, are granting ridiculous patents after spending a lot of time reviewing them, or they're doing their job properly (or trying to, though how some of these patents ever get awarded is beyond me) and are grossly understaffed.
I wonder how much of the backlog is frivolous patents, like IBM's recent applications, and that one involving gift cards.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
Congress steals the PTO's money
The PTO isn't a separate entity that has a firewalled budget.
Congress sees the PTO as a cash cow and takes more from the PTO than they give back.
So, yes the PTO is under-funded.
No the fault isn't the company/inventors the fault is Congress.
Tell Congress to get their greedy little hands off the PTO and let them have the money they make.
....software patents and business methods. Which neither are of such qualities required of patents.
they are probably underestimating the backlog
To me, maths dictates that if the patent office hired 12,000 examiners this year and did so for the next 5 years, the problem described would begin to decrease at year 3 and disappear at year 5. That would be an achievement by US standards. Why don't these officials just do this grade 9 math?
i must be a n00b in the patent process, because i don't understand why we need people to review patents in the first place. why don't we simply publish every patent on some online database, and review patents _only if_ disputes arise? if someone wants to patent something, then he must sift through the patent records _himself_ and make sure he's not infringing on anyone's rights. if a dispute (i.e. lawsuit) should ever be filed, _then_ we check the patent records to verify and take the appropriate course of action. with this system, people who want to patent things will be a lot more careful about their research on prior patents, no? maybe they'll even contact people with similar patents and clear everything up so that no disputes arise in the future? and the cost to the USPTO is simply publishing all the patents online and checking over disputed patents?
Nobody working there will tell you about how the office works, because of confidentiality requirements. I see a lot of complaints about too many patents getting through. The actual case is that there are probably too many patents being rejected. They are erring on the side of caution, as they always have, but the patents that get approved, with just a couple of notable exceptions that you've been reading about, really and truly deserve protection. These folks work their butts off to make sure that the right thing is done. Occasionally a very sneaky lawyer will figure out how to work the system over, like through continuation rules, but this is very unusual.
My Patent:
A method to reduce the Patent Office backlog.
Fine a submitter for filing a frivolous patent, or patent squatting. Betcha that backlog clears out overnight. But in the meantime, I want to patent a method of diffusing particles across a semi-permeable membrane and then sue people for breathing. brb.
outsource to India and China
Eclipse PDE and Me
There is a simple solution to the problem of too many patents to examine. Go back to requiring a working prototype. You would have to supply working source code for any software patent. Business "methods" patents would not be acceptable unless you could demonstrate the method actually in use.
So Arthur C. Clarke would not have been able to patent the idea of geostationary satellites. He didn't so nothing was lost. Were current patent procedures in place in the late 40s, most certainly a patent troll would have patented it. But what harm is there in forcing comeone to actually get a satellite to geostationary orbit before allowing a patent? It would certainly encourage research and development rather than litigation and argument. Forcing Edison to actually get a filament that worked before granting him a patent on the light bulb worked out for the better, rather than allowing him to patent the "idea" of using an electrically heated filament to generate light. If he had gotten the patent without the working model he could have sat back and just sued anyone implementing electic lights for the next 17 years. It would have set back progress tremendously.
Everyone should tag this karma. Cause and effect at its very best.
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Go canucks, habs, and sens!
I mean, if anyone and his neighbor's dog can file a patent about practically anything, how would anyone expect that the paperwork involved in dealing with the sh*tloads of useless crap would descrease ? Only one solution I'd see working would be a stricter and saner regularization of the patent submission process, not to increase the processing of the submitted crap, but to decrease the number of submissions that are potentially junk from the beginning but they still have to wate insane amount of hours and people to judge those submissions.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I hope the system becomes clogged to the point where a new patent application made, say, next year, would theoretically be granted at a time just beyond the time of the anticipated singularity!
Like copyright, patents hold back innovation. Those protections need to be abolished. It's impossible for an intelligent person to create anything new anymore without unwittingly re-inventing the things covered by existing patents.
I wish someone would create software to generate arbitrary, valid patents -- millions at a time -- and pay to submit them all. I think society should essentially wage a "Denial Of Service" attack on the US Patent Office. The "protection" of patents has cost society enough.
If patents are allowed to continue, then make it like insurance: The patent holder pays a premium that is equal to 10% of the desired protection amount, EVERY YEAR, for a maximum of 10 years. The patent holder can change the protection amount each year. However, after the patent holder pays a premium for the year, ANYBODY can pay that same premium amount directly to the patent holder to use the patent. Also, ANYBODY can pay 10X the premium amount to forcefully acquire the patent. So, a patent holder is forced to pay to keep a patent alive. If they want to protect themselves from having the patent bought out from under them, they'll make sure they're actually making money from the patent before paying for patent protection. The ongoing payments make it painful to hang on to a patent, while still making confident and profitable ventures continue to be protected for up to 10 years. The ability to buy out a patent based on 10X the patent-holder's desired protection level, combined with the fact the the patent-holder is forced to pay an annual premium that is 10% of the desired protection level, keeps the pressure on the patent-holder to set a protection level that actually reflects their commitment to the patent. There is an annual auction-like quality, but by forcing the patent holder to sacrifice 10% of that auction price to keep the patent we prevent the patent-holder from blocking others from using the patent. If another company has the ability to make significantly more profit on the patent, they can buy the patent outright for a known amount (10X what the current patent holder is willing to pay out each year).
The exponential fee schedule is another promising idea, but the dynamic range of patent values might make it impossible to choose an exponent that is fair for both ends of the dynamic range. Assessing the value of a patent is too likely to lead to corruption.
As far as protecting the "little guy" inventor, I think they should simply keep their idea secret until they can find a buyer. If the buyer is able to clone the idea merely by looking at a prototype, then the idea wasn't worth protecting. If a person can replicate the idea simply by hearing a general description, then the idea was not worth protecting. The little guy inventor should only be protected if the idea cannot be replicated after observing a demonstration of the idea -- and, therefore, the inventor should be able to safely negotiate payment from someone who CAN pay the patent protection money each year. The currently infinite protection, and zero barrier to entry, afforded by today's patent system -- to protect the little guy -- is needlessly costing society a lot.
I don't think society needs patents or copyrights to ensure the continuation of innovation. I think entrepreneurs should shift their focus to producing physical objects and services. It seems like a step backwards from the information age to the industrial age, but information production and transfer is becoming easier. Real manufacturing and services (communication, distributed storage, banking, etc) are immune to copying.
I don't think the inventors and creators of our society feel protected by patents and copyrights. I think the current generation of would-be inventors and creators feel *threatened* and *stif
Actually PTO is trying to throw bodies at a problem which stems from gross IT inefficiencies. Utilizing multiple customized databases that was designed for storing gif scans of photographs and not streamlining workflow processes is a big reason why it takes so long for a patent to process. It doesn't matter if they hire 10,000 or 100,000 lawyers and phd's, if you have print from one database in order to re-type the same information into another database only to then have to e-mail your supervisor that you need his approval, just says volumes about the mismanagement of your tax dollars. I can't believe that I went to grad school to deal with this frustrating process. I'm outta here at the next hiring season.
Step 1: Hire more patent officers.
Step 2: Raise the price of applying to meet costs of #1.
Step 3: Once backlog is clear create stricter application process.
Step 4: Based on number of man hours required for new process introduced in 3, raise prices again.
Step 5: Review demand now that it costs more and is less likely to success; adust staffing to meet new demand.
...in a light bulb?
Hmmmm, I don't think they know how to do that, no matter how many.
They seems to persist with in the darkness of believing software and business methods are of patent-able subject matter.
1. Preprocess - outsource this process to eliminate frivilous and easy to eliminate claims. Speed up the next two steps.
2. Process the patent applications.
3. Validate - check, verify, grant.
O this learning! What a thing it is - William Shakespeare
Let me make this clear. Patents are a good concept but poorly implemented. They are NOT doing what they were intended to do. When you attack a problem why are so many of you attacking the end result (backlog, frivilous patents etc) instead of attacking the root of the problem, the requirements for a patent. Lets explore the main types of patents Tangible Non-Tangible You don't get more general than that. Tangible is a patent on something that you can touch feel, the other is business processes etc. Non Tangible would be a method, like one click and that whole mess. I do not believe, for ANY reason, that a non-tangible patent should be permitted. PERIOD. Great! You came up with a great idea for clicking a button and paying your shopping cart online. Um... that's not really innovation, that's just convenience. However, if you INVENT a new technology... lets say you invented FLASH... thats different. That is a new technology. Not a method. I believe software patents on software (your actual code NOT methods) should be allowed. You spend 5 years developing a new point of sale system that intelligently communicates with most current hardware without too much configuration. YES that should be patentable.. but NOT "Method of making a smart interface that smartly communicates with various other hardware to reduce configuration time". If we limit Patents to tangible things the backlog will go away. The lawsuits will mostly go away. The patent trolls will mostly go away because instead of just thinking of an idea, they have to have something to show the idea in reality. NDA's, privacy agreements etc all take care of the rare situations where people with great ideas are looking for funding but worried about their ideas being taken. You cannot sit on an idea. People MUST be able to move forward with it.
I have a suggestion: how about scrapping the current concept of patents, and instead award time-limited exclusive rights to entities that SHOW A PRODUCT USING THE COVETED TECHNOLOGY instead of just filing a paper?
I never managed to wrap my head around the fact that I can own the rights to almost anything - as long as nobody else did it first - by just having to file for an application to verify this and pay for the process.
In the next step somebody writes the application as vaguely as possible to give away as little information as possible while trying to grab as much as possible. Then someone will stare incredulously at my application with a stamp twitching in the hand, while tics cause their cheek to spasm. One second and an exaperated curse at the incomprehensible text later, WHAM, I am awarded a billion dollar paper that says I own something I may have never conceived, touched or even spent many minutes pondering about.
Show me an invention that isn't obvious to the expert! They exist, of course - in abundance - yet probably make up for a microscopic fraction of all the patents. But most of the time evolution and developemnt stand on the shoulders of giants and your expert peers will say "Yeah, I thought about that years ago, I just never made anything about it" about your inventions.
Thus, just procuring an idea on paper should not be enough to get a patent. You should also be able to demonstrate that you are actually UTILIZING the concept!
They need to find a way to make it less desirable for businesses to mandate IP from their employees. Many businesses make it part of an engineers yearly tasks to produce IP. This leads to a lot of (should be) unpatentable ideas being pushed into the stream.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
See subject.
Also, require a prototype within a reasonable amount of time, or no patent. It takes no real resources to draw a picture and write a description. The patent itself should not be the product that you profit from. If you have no intention of creating anything with your patent (or helping others to create with it), then you have no business having the damned thing.
I just hope that all these people they're hiring, are going to receive proper training.
1200 patent examiners a year means that they also need to train 1200 people a year...
Teacher: "Welcome to Patent Examination Training. Please open your folders. You each have a patent application in your hands. Start looking through it and hand it in to me by the end of the day as a Pass/Fail patent grade. This is your first assignment."
Student: "But we don't know how to pass a patent."
Teacher: "Nonsense, you do the homework, I'll grade your work, poof! Patent system at its best!"
A black cat crossing your path signifies that the animal is going somewhere. -- Groucho Marx
Does it bother anyone else that if this were done across the Internet it would be considered a ddos attack? Any chance we could arrest law school professors for infecting the brains of patent lawyers with this malicious bit of code?
Violence is like duct tape. If it doesn't solve the problem, you didn't use enough.
Big ridiculously rich companies (and their friends and sub companies) have a cap on how many patents they can have. Period.
Reject the mall!
From someone on the inside I can tell you that this is not a simple issue. As noted, applications and inventions get more complicated, the search for pertinent prior art gets wider and the amount of time we have to do the work gets shorter. In theory they can hire many new examiners... but we are faced with a huge space crunch here as well. Brand new campus and there is limited room/offices for all these new examiners to work. They would like everyone to hotel... which means work from home. But the problem is you have to be a certain grade and have a certain amount of experience before you can do so. A good thing because this is not a job you learn in weeks or months... its one that takes years to learn to do well. Heck, some of us enjoy having our office and prefer this office environment. But the management side of the office is just worried about production... get cases out. The examiners can do more more more... that is until the stress of meeting our unrealistic production quotas burns us out and we quit. That is if you make it that far. I know brand new examiners, less than a year in, that have already looked elsewhere. And these are bright, hardworking people...
Add in the fact that the software we use is a Frankenstein mess of stuff cobbled together from other places and squeezed to work the way we need. We kill more time waiting for and trying to get our tools to work than we often do examining. So what are they doing about it? Hiring top programmers, even pulling examiners who know our system and are great software developers as well to do the work? Maybe hiring a top company who already has their know how in it like Google? No, they keep using the same block headed people as always to produce half baked software that is beta tested live on us trying to do our job. Oops, software doesn't work? Can't produce? Well, you better figure out how to make production. Mind you if the managers don't do their job they don't get reprimanded and often get a bonus on top of things at the end of the year anyway. Examiner who can't keep up get reprimanded and fired.
So the reality is that there is a lot of lip service by the top administrators here about doing the best job, being the best IP org in the world, etc... but the bottom line is that examiners are pushed to their limits trying to do a good job but see little reward or true respect for it in house. Quality of examination goes out the window over production, and at a certain level that is what starts to happen the higher the grade you are since your production ramps up as well.
If you don't believe me... go ask an examiner at the PTO. Ask several and see how far their answers differ. Not much I feel.
"This technology stuff is just plum crazy!"
i think you have examiners confused with the court system.
The examining corp, nor the office itself ever allowed software patents, rather it was a court decision
see State Street Bank & Trust Company v. Signature Financial Group, Inc., 149 F.3d 1368 (Fed. Cir. 1998), 47 USPQ2d 1596
Bring back the old version of slashdot.
We don't know how to change it.
What we DO know is that *some* people will stop "inventing". We don't know any more whether this means there will be no inventing.
Have a look at the use of OSS (especially BSD). You can't monetise your code like you can in CSS but there still seems to be a lot of work done anyway. And being paid for. Why? Because for the producer, they get something done quicker or cheaper. If they didn't invent this new gizmo, they'd be old and slow still. Yes, their gizmo may now be taken by their competitors, but how much is that really worth? It still takes time to tool for it, still takes time to implement and find out how to work with the new process. And meanwhile, an innovative company is not sitting still but is improving some more.
Progress will be made because the inventions help those that investigate it.
How much will that work? If it works better than the current system, which definitely doesn't mean "works well", then it's a worthwhile idea.
Sure. But you'd throw out a lot of legitimate patents. A patent covering e.g. "A method to produce chemical X..." which goes on to specify the method (not one which uses that verbiage to cover all methods, as do many bad patents) is not a bad patent, unless you're opposed to all patents.
It is plausible to say that a sequence of instructions is not an invention. What makes "a method to produce chemical X" as legitimate as "a machine that produces chemical X"?
While motivation to innovate was needed a few hundred years ago, it's currently not needed anymore. It currently only serves large companies and people who want to control the market (the owners of those large companies).
When it was needed, the world was (mostly) governed by aristocracy. The aristocrats basically cared about one thing: power. So they needed an incentive to create something which they could monopolize (so they have absolute power over it). Enter the patent system. All of a sudden those aristocrats had reason to innovate (or to foster innovation THEY could control).
Over time the aristocrats were replaced with large companies (sad, but true), but the system under which large companies work is exactly the reverse of that of the aristocrats (an aristocrat needs money to get more power, a company needs power to get more money).
Now, how is power gained? Exactly, through knowledge. Now, the patent system allows you control over who gets to apply your knowledge. This control over information obstructs further development, thus obstructing competition... thus obstructing economic growth.
Copyrights, another such flawed system. It allows control over distribution of information. Where it was relevant up to 15 years ago, it's currently completely irrelevant. And it again only serves to obstruct economic growth.
If you replace copyrights with author's rights (as to ensure that the author is able to extract income from his works), I'm perfectly happy with it. Although this still obstructs the distribution of information, it doesn't obstruct the growth of information.
But alas, these completely counterintuitive ideas (patents and copyrights) won't go away, unless it's absolutely needed. In the meanwhile the bureaucracy will get worse and worse, to the point that the world economy is completely crippled and courts are clogged with patent and copyright infringement cases.
When the patent backlog reaches 20 years, the whole bad patent problem will have been solved. By the time patents are approved, they'll have expired!
1. Pass legislation reversing the court the ruling that allows for business process patents. These constitute a huge number of the pending patents I bet - and have been the basis for most so-called software patents.
2. Specify that neither business methods nor software can be patented.
3. Invalidate ALL standing patents that were issued under the previous rule.
That simple.
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