Patent Office Shows Record Backlog 236
acroyear writes "WTOP, 1500am, a news radio station in the DC area, is reporting that the Patent Office Is Seeing Record Backlog, with 2 years for a patent now, and potentially 4 years to wait by decade's end, and the PTO is considering a 15% increase in filing fees. Personally, I think if they had set a trend of actually rejecting patents that don't belong, they'd have sent enough of a message to keep application numbers to a reasonable level; right now, everybody files because just about everything can get one."
Please Remember this PTO Budget Reality (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Fee Schedule (Score:5, Informative)
Good patents are already rewarded: they are enforceable and can be licensed. Bad patents can be challenged.
1) flat-out-reject anything that's already patented.
That is what the patent office does already.
2) reject anything with prior art
Already done.
3) Have a QUALIFIED examiner spend some time looking it over.
Examiners are assigned to the various units based on their qualifications. In other words, a chemist examines chemical patents, an electrical engineers examines circuit patents.
4) Have a certain public review periond (6 months?) that anyone can register complaints
That's the whole point of the publication process. Before 2000, patent applications remained secret until they were issued. Now, they are published 18 months after filing. The public can look at the applications and submit prior art references.
5) Review complaints (possible reject)
See above.
6) Have another, different qualified examiner check it out for an extended period of time.
All examiners have a supervisor.
Small Entities already have a discount (Score:5, Informative)
Small entities already pay less than large entities. For example, the filing fee for a small entity is only $375, compared to $750 for large entities. The definition of Small Entity is long, but, as a starting point, individuals and companies with fewer than 500 employees is considered a small entity.
Re:Fee Schedule (Score:5, Informative)
Already done.
NO IT'S NOT!
I'm sick of people with no clue spouting this shit in slashdot comments and getting modded up to propagate this incorrect information.
Repeat after me: You can patent things that have prior art.
In fact, it's completely allowed and the prior art is usually documented right in the application. A patent does NOT mean the holder has exclusive rights to everything in the patent. It only gives them exclusive rights on the claims that exceed the prior art. Half the time I see people bitching about some silly patent on here, they fail to take this into account.
Please people, before you go spouting off about prior art in patents, make sure you know what you're talking about and that you didn't get that information from a slashdot comment that was posted by somebody who could be a clueless toddler for all you know.
Re:Any other Fortune 500 employees? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Assumptions (Score:3, Informative)
Re:The government should create a "patent tax" (Score:2, Informative)
Qualified examiners? Not exactly... (Score:2, Informative)
First this http://www3.uspto.gov/go/jars/sgs.html [uspto.gov]
then this http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ahrpa/ohr/job
So if I've got a degree in Chemical Engineering, I can start at the US Patent office making a whole $32,819 a year! And it gets better. If I have a masters in Chemical Engineering I can start at $47,240! And my reward for these splendid salaries? I get to sit and stare at patent applications all day. Even in this crappy enconomy, those salaries don't look that good. Imagine the kind of employee they were able to hire in the boom of the previous decade. Yeah.
I realize that I could've been nicer and more politic in this post, but...well I have no excuse. I just didn't feel like it.
Beuracracts can't determine novelty (Score:4, Informative)
03.02.26.we | Non-Novel Patents [goatee.net]
In addition to the alarm about the unruly expansion of copyright [goatee.net], an outcry over an offensive software or method patent is surfacing nearly every week now. But the storm is not yet upon us, these are merely the first chunky hail stones: it can, and probably will, get much worse.
Patents are supposed to be novel, useful, and non-obvious. However, these are rather subjective criteria that require the discretion of knowledge, experience, and good judgment. Such attributes belong to those skilled in an art, not to bureaucratic institutions. (Witness how those administrative functions formerly administered by John Postel, a skillful and respected Internet elder [harvard.edu], are now bungled [thestandard.com] by ICANN, the bureaucracy now responsible.) However, we have no great patent arbiter, only a governmental process and this has led to a focus on, and misunderstanding of, prior art by computer professionals.
The question of novelty and non-obviousness is proxied by a mechanistic process of push and pull between a patent applicant and patent examiner. An examiner, on his own judgment, can not easily dismiss the application of a proprietary interest worth, potentially, millions of dollars. He can only ask, "how is your claim different than this prior art." Once this dance is done, a court is not likely to disregard the patent's novelty as documented in its file wrapper (the exchange between the applicant and examiner) and the resulting claims.
In the narrowest construction, this process of emulating good judgment with respect to novelty and non-obviousness works: the resulting patent claims are more narrow than the initial application with respect to some existing works. But in the sense of promoting innovation and the "useful arts and sciences" of computer software and networking, it is a huge failure.
As I've mentioned before [goatee.net], "Good technology, often created through simple processes, lends itself to applications unforeseen by its designers." As Lessig, in The Future of Ideas [stanford.edu], amply demonstrates this principle is what makes the Internet and Web such an innovative force when as expressed as layered end-to-end architecture. To adopt his metaphor, our common roads permit arbitrary journeys; our private cars permit us to traverse our chosen paths. Much like the Internet and Web, there are no patents or controls on the roads that determine where you must go. (There are rules such as which side of the street to drive on, much like networking protocols [harvard.edu], but these don't affect your destination.) It would be a shame to loose this flexibility, and this is just what the patent system encourages: claims that combine our common infrastructure and abilities in "novel" ways.
It's as if roads and driving themselves are recognized as an important infrastructure and ability, but someone could patent using a car on a road to drive to my house. Is using a car on a road to drive to my house really that novel? The Patent and Trademark Office can not make this judgment well, it will only look for prior art of someone previously, explicitly, specifying this exact method in the past. Perhaps they will find the method of driving to my house that I've provided [reagle.org] on the Web. The applicant might then amend their application such that they have a claim for a car, on the road, driven to my house using a stick shift, and a new claim for the same using automatic transmission. The claims have been narrowed and there is no previous exact d
Re:Does anyone know if this will hold up... (Score:4, Informative)
One other possibility is to file something called a Provisional Patent Application. These applications are not examined and will never become patents unless you file a Utility Patent Application. But the date you filed it is an official record then.
Re:Small Entities already have a discount (Score:2, Informative)
Not to act all prissy, but actually it isn't that long:
1) Independent inventors (someone who has not assigned and is not under obligation to assign the invention)
2) Nonprofit organizations
3) Small business concerns
See here [uspto.gov]. What's long is the document [sba.gov] that defines what a small business concern is by the industry it is in. You might note that a "Electronic computer manufacturing" business is a small entity if it has less than 1,000 employees, whereas for beer and ale wholesalers it's 100. "Custom computer programming services" are defined in dollar amounts, though, where the limit is $18M in revenue.
Re:The government should create a "patent tax" (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Qualified examiners? Not exactly... (Score:1, Informative)
As for your insinuation that examiners are the least skilled or unqualified simply because they make less than they might in the private sector, that is just asinine. I think you *do* have an excuse for not being "nicer" or "more politic" - you are a doofus. But as far as being ignorant is concerned, then no, you have no excuse.
Re:ya, because we all know... (Score:3, Informative)
Then why are you acting like you do?
only USPTO workers educated in that field(computer science, for example) would be able to accept patents
Patents are already grouped into different technology centers. See this page [uspto.gov] for a broad overview of the different technology centers. After an application is filed, it is categorized (see here for the different categories [uspto.gov]) and an examiner in the appropriate technology center is assigned to the application.