Actually, it should be obvious that the patent office needs money. Calling that "making money" was imprecise, but no office runs without money to pay for, say, the telephones, the desks, or the people who come in every day to do the work. Coming to the office "for the common good" is not an incentive for anyone who needs to pay rent or a mortgage and who needs to periodically eat food. So, yeah, it's obvious that the patent office needs money.
It's equally obvious that the current method of making money directly contradicts the purpose of having a patent office in the first place, and I think that is your legitimate complaint, crabpeople. While I might commend your idealism and passion, unfortunately, you probably need a healthy dose of business sense to actually find a solution. Which is why I pointed to the Gamasutra article in the first place. Lawyers are making a lot of money in this field, maybe the patent office should try getting a cut of that instead a few dollars per frivolous patent.
Obviously the patent office needs to make money. Tying income to volume, while obvious, is a bad solution because it probably does the opposite of encouraging and protecting innovation, which is what patents are supposed to do in the first place. I'm not sure whether David Sirlin's suggestions in his Gamasutra article http://www.sirlin.net/archive/my-patent-article-on -gamasutra/ will work, but I doubt they could be worse than the current setup. On the other hand, there's not much you can do when the shortage of federal funds is due to their being sent out of the country these days. It's affecting many government agencies, not just the patent office.
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Actually, it should be obvious that the patent office needs money. Calling that "making money" was imprecise, but no office runs without money to pay for, say, the telephones, the desks, or the people who come in every day to do the work. Coming to the office "for the common good" is not an incentive for anyone who needs to pay rent or a mortgage and who needs to periodically eat food. So, yeah, it's obvious that the patent office needs money. It's equally obvious that the current method of making money directly contradicts the purpose of having a patent office in the first place, and I think that is your legitimate complaint, crabpeople. While I might commend your idealism and passion, unfortunately, you probably need a healthy dose of business sense to actually find a solution. Which is why I pointed to the Gamasutra article in the first place. Lawyers are making a lot of money in this field, maybe the patent office should try getting a cut of that instead a few dollars per frivolous patent.
Obviously the patent office needs to make money. Tying income to volume, while obvious, is a bad solution because it probably does the opposite of encouraging and protecting innovation, which is what patents are supposed to do in the first place. I'm not sure whether David Sirlin's suggestions in his Gamasutra article http://www.sirlin.net/archive/my-patent-article-on -gamasutra/ will work, but I doubt they could be worse than the current setup. On the other hand, there's not much you can do when the shortage of federal funds is due to their being sent out of the country these days. It's affecting many government agencies, not just the patent office.