Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
"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.
You may consider this design to be placed in the public domain
--
make install -not war
I think in this difficult time for our government all patriotic Americans should refrain from inventing stuff for the next five years.
They'd each need to do around a patent per day to get this finished with your numbers. But they are obviously flawed you forgot that you are dealing with a government program.
Patent requests: 400$ * 1,300,000 = +345,000,000$
RIAA support: 55,000,000
Physical infrastructure costs: 1 * 10,000,000 = -50,000,000
Execs: 2,000,000 * 7 = -35,000,000
Coordinators: 500,000 * 10 = -15,000,000
People who we don't know what they do (Management??): 80,000 * 300 = -24,000,000
Political bargaining: -35,000,000
Minimal patent examiners: - 35,000,000
Remaining funds: -as mush as you can convince people
In fact they are in dire need of financial support, for a government program they are barely scraping by.
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 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.
In principle, not evil at all. The idea is that the government will grant you a limited time monopoly on your invention, provided you document everything so that once your time is up, anyone can create and improve on the idea. This is in contrast to trade secrets, where you get to keep your invention for as long as you can keep it a secret.
(As a side note, the NSA has cheated this system, where some of their algorithms are currently a trade secret, and will suddenly become a patent if they're ever revealed).
The system today has severe implementation flaws, but the idea behind it is brilliant.
Not a typewriter
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.
Why do people speak as if the founding fathers were infallible? Not that I don't agree with your points. I would add medical patents to that list though, at least for non Viagra type medicines.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
If they start outsourcing to india, this kind of surplus could generate more revenue than oil.
;-)
If they start outsourcing to India, we'd probably see a lot of new inventions coming out of India
----------------------------------- My Other Sig Is Hilarious -----------------------------------
What is WITH this founding fathers cult? Can't you trust logic and argumentation, must you invoke a bunch of ancients as some kind of semi-divine authority to back your opinions up?
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.
Bzzzt...thank you for playing. at $400 each, it doesn't even cover the cost of the prime examiner. A post above gave about 8 hrs of allowed time for a patent examination (10 per bi-week). Even if they all went to fresh-hires (i.e. inexperienced) at $63k/yr+ 10k bonus, with a typical "efficient" overhead and G&A of 80%, and accounting for sick, vacation, and holiday leave (264 hrs/yr to start), I get a net cost of $541 per patent. And that ignores training, startup, any other incentives, higher cost of experienced examiners, re-examination, etc.
Even with all the cash they have, they can't hire enough to get them back to even.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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!
Just patents made sense 200 years ago, doesn't mean they made sense today. For instance, having a patent valid for 17 years used to make sense because it would probably take that long before your invention had adequate market penetration. However products don't even last 17 years anymore before the company, or inventor moves on to something else. 17 years seems like a really long time in our fast paced society. The world wide web wasn't even something most of the public knew about 17 years ago.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.