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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."
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!
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"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.
I'd imagine most are actually business method patents. Software patents are stupid. Business method patents are even stupider. (Yes, there is some overlap, like software-implemented business method patents)
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.
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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 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 =/ )
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?
No, patents have their place or the founding fathers would have forbade them altogether. The current problems stem largely from
(1) business method patents
(2) software patents
(3) genome patents
(4) the patenting process (including the difficulty and cost of overturning a patent, compared to getting an obvious patent through)
(5) patent trolls abusing (4).
Patents on physical inventions which are clearly new, innovative, and unique are fine.
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.
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.
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!
It must be great to live in such a simple world :)
Really though. If you have a bunch of people who discover a process in a lab to, let say, make a type of semi-conductor that would allow processors to be 10 times faster...well, you may not exactly have the facilities to make CPUs... so the only people allowed to research them (and make money from it) is Intel, AMD and co?
Man you must love your large corporations!
That would require the patent office to be able to find 12,000 people in the US each year that want to be patent examiners.
I still think that the solution is to eliminate the idea of patents being "granted" after a review by the patent office. Instead they should change to a system where patent applications are recorded and only reviewed when someone tries to enforce the patent. At that time, the defendant can be responsible for doing the prior art search and the patent office only needs to be responsible for *evaluating* the claims. It's a much stronger model.
The current patent examiners have no incentive to deny patents, as their productivity is entirely measured in patent applications processed. Obviously it is easier to approve an application than it is to find a valid reason to deny it, so approval becomes the default state.
Doing things that way would also push patent applications to be better up front. Under the current system, it makes sense to request the broadest patent that you can. What's the worst that happens? The patent is denied and you refile with more narrow claims. By removing that initial review and weakening the meaning of the patent application being accepted, the system pushes more of that burden on to the appliers. Now they want to write the best patent applications possible so that the patent application survives the more rigorous test of examination by a defendant (who is presumably knowledgeable in the field and highly incented to find reasons why the patent is invalid). Particularly since there now is no second chance for a patent application -- if it's badly written and falls over, refiling now would be too late. People already have competing implementations.
The current system is bad because it disassociates costs and benefits. The cost of the bad patents are borne by the defendants in patent infringement cases, but those defendants are not involved in the original patent application. As such, they have no opportunity to block bad patents even though they have the incentive to do so. Patent examiners benefit from quick resolution of patent applications but bear none of the costs of passing bad patents. Patent applicants actually benefit from their own bad patents.
Fixing this either requires the patent office to bear some of the cost of passing bad patents or it requires replacement of the current system with one which allows defendants to participate in the evaluation of the patent claims. Making the patent office bear the costs of bad patents would be hard to implement and the transition would be expensive. It seems much simpler to change the process so that patents are not awarded but only requested. That moves patent application processing into a realm where productivity goals make sense and allows defendants to participate in the invalidation of patents.
Imagine a world where a patent troll patented HTTP or SMTP 15 years ago.
Yes, no Internet.
Maybe the patent system is broken if it does the opposite of what it suppose to do then?
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.
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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