USPTO Plans Could Kill Small Business Innovation

bizwriter writes "If protecting inventions is at the heart of high tech competitiveness, plans afoot at the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will critically wound small companies. The agency's notorious 750,000 patent application backlog has long been the subject of heavy criticism. One of the key tools the USPTO wants to use is to raise fees so high as to directly reduce 40 percent of the backlog. That would mean setting filing and maintenance rates so high as to make it economically difficult, if not impossible, for many small companies to adequately protect their innovations, leaving large corporations even more in control of technology than they are now."

Comments

Re:"Could" is too soft a word

[gtbritishskull]

So, are you claiming that the patent application is now correctly priced? Why shouldn't we make it lower? Are some small businesses priced out of the market? If it were changed to $0.01 per application, would small business owners then thrive? Or would they be strangled by the plethora of patent trolls that popped up? Are we already strangled by the plethora of patent trolls out there? It is easy to say "change is bad", but is the status quo not already bad?