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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!
Live life to the fullest. It's not that life is short, but that you are dead for so long.
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.
You may consider this design to be placed in the public domain
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make install -not war
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.