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Study Suggests Patent Office Lowered Standards To Cope With Backlog
An anonymous reader points out a story at Ars about how the "significant reduction" in the backlog of pending patent applications may not be all that it seems. "...a new study suggests another explanation for the declining backlog: the patent office may have lowered its standards, approving many patents that would have been (and in some cases, had been) rejected under the administration of George W. Bush. The authors—Chris Cotropia and Cecil Quillen of the University of Richmond and independent researcher Ogden Webster—used Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain detailed data about the fate of patent applications considered by the USPTO since 1996.
They found that the "allowance rate," the fraction of applications approved by the patent office, declined steadily from 2001 and 2009. But in the last four years there's been a sharp reversal, with a 2012 allowance rate about 20 percent higher than it was in 2009."
At my last company we got pushed into doing patent fillings to "build an IP wall" and increase the perceived value of the company to investors. Lots of patent applications flowed out of that effort and 90% of them were junk. Most of them got some sort of provisional rejection out of the gate, but after the lawyers got done mixing in some word salad (all of the "inventors" have left the company) almost everything has been accepted.
I'm going with the lowered standards.
There should be a penalty for submitting bad patents.
Is there a form to fill out for this? YOUR IDEA REGARDING [x] patents IS UNWORKABLE BECAUSE [x] It penalizes small applicants [x] It will be gamed just as much as the existing system.
The basic fundamental problem is that the patent office receives money to grant patents. Instead, it must receive money to evaluate patents. They get a small amount of money when you file, and a larger amount when they grant. The only solution I can see is a complete overhaul involving granting a lot less patents, but that's not going to happen without a complete overhaul of our society, because that challenges the mighty status quo.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
More likely this is a function of the internet, and the ability to search for prior art in a matter of minutes.
In the past a party looking to get a patent would go back and forth with the patent examiner at the USPTO a number of times, because the USPTO had a vast library of prior art that your average person doesn't have access to. Every time the examiner came up with prior art the patent would have to be rewritten to shrink it claims.
Now with the internet, anybody can search just about any database, this means the first draft patent will include more examples of prior art, a patent with less broad claims, and less for the patent examiner to object to.
A better measure of whether the USPTO is lowering its standards is the number of broad claims versus narrow claims in a patent. As well as the number of prior art examples cited in the patent, by definition if the prior art describes an aspect of the patent, that aspect is not patented, it is cited as a reference to what the patent DOES NOT cover.
3. Allowance rate increases as average quality of patent applications increases.
You have to be a troll. A reasonable person can't think this...
Someone whose beliefs about patents are based on what they read on Slashdot, will not believe this. But someone who actually looks at reality will see things differently. The quality of patents really has improved in recent years. Much of this is because of the Supreme Court ruling in KSR vs Teleflex, which expanded and clarified the "obviousness" criteria, as well as invalidating many types of "combination" patents.
Another reason the backlog of patents has declined is that the USPTO is better funded, and has hired many more patent examiners. In 2005, there were about 7300 examiners. Today, there are more than 9500.
he existence of patents do not "hamstring the march of human knowledge." I can't speak for everyone, but the fact is that there are a lot of creative people out there who don't create just for the joy of creating, or for altruistic reasons-- they do it for the money. I'm sure that altruism and personal accomplishment are high on the list, but the fact remains that if an invention is beneficial and its development was performed morally, we shouldn't care why it was done.
I call BS. If there were no patent system, then inventors would bring their products to market anyways. Inventors don't bring products to market because the patent system protects them, they do it because if they don't, they are guaranteed not to make any money. Patents, like copyright are an archaic solution to a problem that doesn't really exist anymore, and possibly never did. A company that brings a novel product to market, will have at least a year before a competitor can copy it and bring the copies to market. This is all the protection an inventor should need. Anything more is a cancer to be removed.
On the other side of the coin, I can think of at least a few products which have not made it to market because of patents, and the inventors will not even try until the offending patents expire in another 10 years. For example, Touch sensitive trigger for paintball guns would be a very neat idea, but until recently were not viable because they required the paintball gun to use an electronic triggering mechanism, the patent for which was granted almost 20 years ago. The company that owned the patent was charging outrageous fees to use their technology, which was obvious technology to virtually every engineer that ever touched a paintball gun. Because of that one company and the patent system that supported them, paintball guns have remained largely in the dark ages for 20 years. The company itself long ago stopped innovating, and it wasn't until they went out of business under the weight of their own ineptitude that everyone else started making better products again. (They also managed to keep the cost of paintball equipment an order of magnitude higher than it should have been, and largely strangled the sport as a result).
Patents are bad. Most people with an IQ in the triple digits understand this intuitively, even if they cant put an explanation to it. They were designed so that novel inventions would end up being cataloged in such a way that the designs could be used for further development, but now they are used as a weapon to prevent companies from having to compete on their merits, and have far outlived their usefulness.
-=Geoskd
I wish I had a good sig, but all the good ones are copyrighted