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Patent Office Admits Truth — Things Are a Disaster
An anonymous reader writes "For years the US Patent and Trademark Office has published data to show how well it and the patent system were running. Under new leadership, the USPTO has begun to publish a dashboard of information, including a new look at questions like how long does it really take to get a final answer on whether you will receive a patent or not? The pat answer was, on the average, about 3 years. But with the new figures, it's obvious that the real number, when you don't play games with how you define a patent application, is six years. The backlog of patents is almost 730K. And the Commerce Department under the Obama administration wants the average down to 20 months. How does this happen? Only if everyone closes their eyes and pretends. It's time to take drastic action, like ending software patents. As it is, by the time companies get a software patent, there's little value to them because, after six years, the industry has already moved on."
I have 3 fairly recent patents (one hardware and two software) - none of them took over 3 years - and two of them took multiple rounds with the patent office
Only if they were stopped by someone like me, explaining to the person why they can't submit this patent. The PTO takes every application seriously which is both a wonderful and horrible thing, until it can be proven un-patentable or that it infringes on an earlier patent. This is done through a semi-long process of research that isn't always done correctly (because of the sheer magnitude of searching for similar patents or parts of similar patents).
On a side-note, I want to clarify that all of those items listed did not get formal paper-work submitted to the Patent Office. If they did they I would not be able to talk about them here or I would be in violation of my previous contract. There are a lot of ridiculous ones that went against my advice and filed anyways.
As messed up as it is, the current system creates more value for patent trolls. If it takes six years to get my patent approved, that's six years "infringing" technology getting baked into competing products.
Oh, a lesson in history from Mr. I'm my own grandpa.
While there was a case a few years back where someone was dipping into customer deposit accounts, I've never heard any reports of examiners being on-the-take to process an application in a certain way. If you've heard something different, feel free to enlighten us.
There is something called a "petition to make special", which in some cases requires a fee, but this is specifically authorized by regulations.
In fact, there are various mechanisms (performance metrics and docketing, both for examiners and their supervisors) which discourage or prevent working on applications out of turn. Examiners do have some flexibility for managing their dockets, but the general push is to work on the earliest-filed applications first.
I have yet to meet a single "garage tinkerer" who made an invention, went through the patent process, and made any money at all much less covered the fees necessary for a decent patent attorney and the filing fees to get the patent in the first place. To me, the whole patent process is simply a major scam that gives false hope to ordinary individuals who are thinking about an invention.
Here's an example: Jerome Lemelson. Individual inventor who was granted over 600 patents and made millions from his inventions. The charitable foundation he created has given over $140 million in funding to over 63,000 student and individual inventors.
Here's another one: Robert Kearns. The individual inventor who invented the intermittent windshield wiper. Kearns eventually recovered several million dollars from the car companies that knowingly copied his invention (and yes, he received considerably more in damages than he spent in legal fees).
Is a patent a license to print money? No. Do all individual inventors with patents profit from their inventions? No. But this has far, far more to do with those inventors tending not to have a very good business plan or, frankly, the invention not being very valuable. For further evidence, see the thousands of largely useless patents that corporations file for every year. Filing for economically unimportant patents is not limited to individual inventors, and it's not an inherent problem with the patent system.
Anyway, do you really want the government saying "no, this doesn't look important enough" to patent applicants? Why should we trust a patent examiner to be the judge of what is and isn't a valuable invention, especially when market conditions can change dramatically over the course of the patent's term?