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Patent Office Ramps Up Patent Approvals
An anonymous reader writes "With the somewhat disappointing Bilski ruling behind us, people concerned about overly broad patents should be looking at what's going on at the US Patent Office. Due to various other Supreme Court decisions and lots of bad publicity, the USPTO had gone on a 'quality binge' for a few years, rejecting a lot more patents than usual. However, with new leadership, it appears that the USPTO is back to its old tricks and approving a ton of patents (at an unheard of rate) in a misguided attempt to get through the 'backlog.' Get ready for another round of patent lawsuits on patents that never should have been granted."
You don't have to pick up every rider ---- it's ok to say no, especially when it's in the broader interest to increase the quality and remove the backlog.
I really do hate this, 90% of politicians are lawyers.
They are an unchecked self-appointing cancer.
The remedy for this is simple enough. If a patent is found invalid by a court and also should never have been granted according to the USPTO's own rules at that time, then require the federal government to pay the victor all legal expenses incurred + any time off work for court + any travel expenses for court, times three, within 30 days of the official ruling.
I also believe that anyone found "not guilty" in a criminal case, or who has charges dropped, should be compensated the same way.
That introduces an element of apoptosis into the self-appointing cancer.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
In particular, without knowing how many applications were rejected, we don't know whether the USPTO is approving a higher percentage of applications, or whether they have just increased up their processing rates.
And without knowing the number of patent examiners on staff over time, we don't know whether any increase in processing rates was caused by spending less time on each application (less scrutiny), whether they have hired more examiners, or whether they are using technology to process applications more efficiently.
Get all those facts, number of examiners, number of applications rejected, etc., and then you might be able to draw some conclusions.
Most patent stories on Slashdot are about silly patents, but raising standards will not solve our problem. Quality is just too hard to judge with something as abstract as software. A reduction of 50% wouldn't solve the fact that MPEG is covered by dozens of patents, and none of the people complaining about silly patents have proposed a way to raise the standards (not to reduce granting by 50%, and not even to reduce it by 1%). Now, we see that granting is still rising. We'll never get quality standards to catch up. The only way to win, and the only clean solution, is to simply cut software out of the list of things that can be patented.
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That's what I got out of the NPR interview. He wants to grow his department to get through the backlog of patent applications and trying to sell this growth to Congress and the public as job creation.
It will create jobs for the new patent examiners he'll need to hire, but I'm not convinced it would do much beyond that.
As I understand it, date of filing gives you the protection you need if you're confident your idea won't be rejected. No small business owner is going to submit a patent, then wait around three years before trying to bring it to market.