The U.S. Patent Backlog 195
coondoggie writes "Even with its increased hiring estimates of 1,200 patent examiners each year for the next 5 years, the US Patent and Trademark Office patent application backlog is expected to increase to over 1.3 million at the end of fiscal year 2011 the Government Accounting Office reported today. The USPTO has also estimated that if it were able to hire 2,000 patent examiners per year in fiscal year 2007 and each of the next 5 years, the backlog would continue to increase by about 260,000 applications, to 953,643 at the end of fiscal year 2011, the GAO said. Despite its recent increases in hiring, the agency has acknowledged that it cannot hire its way out of the backlog and is now focused on slowing the growth of the backlog instead of reducing it. This too is but one of the goals of the Patent Reform Act currently making the rounds in the US Senate."
What they told me (Score:5, Interesting)
They are currently backlogged 5 years.
With their hiring surge of engineers, they want to bring the backlog to 2 years within 4 years IIRC
And apparently they crap money, with a starting salary of 63k with a 10k starting bonus for the first 4 years, plus a 10% bonus if a 130% efficiency rating is maintained for the 4 quarters.
The ones they are particularly hiring are EEs, CSs, and Comp Engs.
Now you know, and remember- Knowledge is power!
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Software patents (Score:4, Interesting)
Obvious Jobs Program (Score:5, Interesting)
In fact, the growth in patents and their revenue should even stimulate the production of American engineers. Offer full scholarships to engineers, funded by those fees, in exchange for them becoming paid examiners for a couple-few years at least, and returning for at least 6 months every 5-10 years for a couple-few decades. If they break that deal, they owe 2x their scholarship immediately, which can pay for more scholarships and paid examiners.
The patent system has many problems. Primary is that the American people subsidize the creation of intellectual property by paying for the expensive examination and challenge system, which we can ill afford with our current budget problems (and which was never fair to the public, anyway). Also too few examiners of too little quality and commitment. Calibrating a fee to hire examiners and create them by scholarship to the volume of applications should make the system more self-regulating. And good for engineers: Albert Einstein had most of his good ideas working in the Swiss patent office, which no doubt benefited from his talent and imagination. Let's see America protect both itself and its inventors with a simple device that balances both.
You may consider this design to be placed in the public domain
Solutions? (Score:2, Interesting)
God I want this Problem (Score:2, Interesting)
What we basically have here is a governmental cash cow.
I want this sort of problem with my side business. Too many customers to deal with!?
If they start outsourcing to india, this kind of surplus could generate more revenue than oil.
If anything I think they should be trying to INCREASE the growth of patent submissions, to better provide for the future generation of america.
If you think of the children, it becomes obvious that there is a lot to gain here.
( repost for readibility =/ )
why check them at all? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Software patents (Score:5, Interesting)
(1) business method patents
(2) software patents
(3) genome patents
(4) the patenting process (including the difficulty and cost of overturning a patent, compared to getting an obvious patent through)
(5) patent trolls abusing (4).
Patents on physical inventions which are clearly new, innovative, and unique are fine.
Simple solution -- working prototypes (Score:5, Interesting)
So Arthur C. Clarke would not have been able to patent the idea of geostationary satellites. He didn't so nothing was lost. Were current patent procedures in place in the late 40s, most certainly a patent troll would have patented it. But what harm is there in forcing comeone to actually get a satellite to geostationary orbit before allowing a patent? It would certainly encourage research and development rather than litigation and argument. Forcing Edison to actually get a filament that worked before granting him a patent on the light bulb worked out for the better, rather than allowing him to patent the "idea" of using an electrically heated filament to generate light. If he had gotten the patent without the working model he could have sat back and just sued anyone implementing electic lights for the next 17 years. It would have set back progress tremendously.
It's not the number of lawyers its the database(s) (Score:1, Interesting)
Broken system, but I have an idea. (Score:3, Interesting)
I never managed to wrap my head around the fact that I can own the rights to almost anything - as long as nobody else did it first - by just having to file for an application to verify this and pay for the process.
In the next step somebody writes the application as vaguely as possible to give away as little information as possible while trying to grab as much as possible. Then someone will stare incredulously at my application with a stamp twitching in the hand, while tics cause their cheek to spasm. One second and an exaperated curse at the incomprehensible text later, WHAM, I am awarded a billion dollar paper that says I own something I may have never conceived, touched or even spent many minutes pondering about.
Show me an invention that isn't obvious to the expert! They exist, of course - in abundance - yet probably make up for a microscopic fraction of all the patents. But most of the time evolution and developemnt stand on the shoulders of giants and your expert peers will say "Yeah, I thought about that years ago, I just never made anything about it" about your inventions.
Thus, just procuring an idea on paper should not be enough to get a patent. You should also be able to demonstrate that you are actually UTILIZING the concept!
Re:What they told me (Score:2, Interesting)
If 99% of all patents got rejected, there would be less incentive to send them in.
Currently fee * chance of getting application through amount of cash expected from patent, even for bad patents.
If the quality the application had to be higher in order to get a reasonable chance of achieving a patent, there would be fewer bad patent applications... which would reduce the revenue.
While your statement may be true in the short run, in the long run it would be counter to the goal of any bureaucracy.
What is needed is a feedback mechanism where there are *some* sort of penalty for the patent office to allow a bad patent application to become a real patent.
Re:Abolish Software and Business Method Patents (Score:3, Interesting)
Really though. If you have a bunch of people who discover a process in a lab to, let say, make a type of semi-conductor that would allow processors to be 10 times faster...well, you may not exactly have the facilities to make CPUs... so the only people allowed to research them (and make money from it) is Intel, AMD and co?
Man you must love your large corporations!
Re:Obvious Jobs Program (Score:3, Interesting)
Patents were supposed to be granted for innovative ideas. Innovative ideas are worth many more times than $10,000, so the fee (actually penalty deposit, so it's refundable, if the patent is granted) is not in the least burdensome. Also dramatically increase the fee and penalty deposit by number of submissions per year from the same company/individuals/holding companies/subsidiaries. Somebody like Microsoft submitting 5,000 patent applications per year at a $400 application fee is ripping off the public taxpayer. Double the fee for each additional application in a fiscal year.
These stops should solve 90% of the problems of the backlog and quality in the first year after implementation alone. Oh, and fire all the moron examiner managers who are currently signing off on the patents.
Re:Obvious Jobs Program (Score:3, Interesting)
In fact, patent filing should be free, but would need at least a nominal fee to deter people from applying at ridiculous rates. Remember that the patent is supposed to protect an inventor with finite budget from having to spend money competing with someone without development expenses who'd just start spending on actual production of the invention, unfair competition. Burdening the inventor with a large filing fee would also set them back against a competitor, often forcing them to negotiate with a licensee at a disadvantage because they can't afford to market it themself without the filing fee to spend. Also, increasing the fee for multiple inventions is both a penalty for productive inventors, which is countersensible, and also encourages bundling inventions into monolithic components that won't be as easy to license for use separately in individual operating devices.
What really should be recognized is that the patent system's limits must be tied to the return on the invention investment, which is what the patent and copyright compromise with free speech in the Constitution is designed to address. Make the patent pay a fee annually that's a percentage of the revenue it generates to the patentholder. Since the patentholder is required to report revenue for income tax anyway, that revenue number should be available. Tie the cost of patenting to the economic return on it, not to the productivity in solely protected inventions.
The revenue amount should also trigger expiration of the patent. Make the patent application report the cost of development, which should also be available at least approximately from the filer's tax returns. Once a patent has returned say 10x, or even 100x, its cost of development, the patent should expire. Patents are not supposed to be licenses to print money out of a state-created artifical monpoly, but rather just "to promote progress in science and the useful arts". If 10x or 100x ROI doesn't promote that progress, nothing will, and greater than 10x ROI to to one exclusive exploiter tends to retard that progress in science and the useful arts, which often interdepend on many external inventions to make a new one. The actual ROI amount can be variable, set annually or similarly periodically by Congress as a matter of industrial policy.
I do like the idea of a bounty paid to anyone in the public who can defeat an application. Maybe assign them 10x the filing fee (which should still be fairly low, like $400) as a bonus, or some bounty derived from how much the government saves by outsourcing that work, and merely supervising/refereeing it. Probably savings + some percentage, to reflect the government's interest in fewer patents and freer commerce, which increases both government receipts (taxes and fees on commerce) and the better, less limited, promotion of science and useful arts that is the government's primary mission.
Re:It's just the math... (Score:3, Interesting)
I still think that the solution is to eliminate the idea of patents being "granted" after a review by the patent office. Instead they should change to a system where patent applications are recorded and only reviewed when someone tries to enforce the patent. At that time, the defendant can be responsible for doing the prior art search and the patent office only needs to be responsible for *evaluating* the claims. It's a much stronger model.
The current patent examiners have no incentive to deny patents, as their productivity is entirely measured in patent applications processed. Obviously it is easier to approve an application than it is to find a valid reason to deny it, so approval becomes the default state.
Doing things that way would also push patent applications to be better up front. Under the current system, it makes sense to request the broadest patent that you can. What's the worst that happens? The patent is denied and you refile with more narrow claims. By removing that initial review and weakening the meaning of the patent application being accepted, the system pushes more of that burden on to the appliers. Now they want to write the best patent applications possible so that the patent application survives the more rigorous test of examination by a defendant (who is presumably knowledgeable in the field and highly incented to find reasons why the patent is invalid). Particularly since there now is no second chance for a patent application -- if it's badly written and falls over, refiling now would be too late. People already have competing implementations.
The current system is bad because it disassociates costs and benefits. The cost of the bad patents are borne by the defendants in patent infringement cases, but those defendants are not involved in the original patent application. As such, they have no opportunity to block bad patents even though they have the incentive to do so. Patent examiners benefit from quick resolution of patent applications but bear none of the costs of passing bad patents. Patent applicants actually benefit from their own bad patents.
Fixing this either requires the patent office to bear some of the cost of passing bad patents or it requires replacement of the current system with one which allows defendants to participate in the evaluation of the patent claims. Making the patent office bear the costs of bad patents would be hard to implement and the transition would be expensive. It seems much simpler to change the process so that patents are not awarded but only requested. That moves patent application processing into a realm where productivity goals make sense and allows defendants to participate in the invalidation of patents.
Re:Software patents (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, no Internet.
Maybe the patent system is broken if it does the opposite of what it suppose to do then?
Get rid of the "information ownership" system. (Score:2, Interesting)
When it was needed, the world was (mostly) governed by aristocracy. The aristocrats basically cared about one thing: power. So they needed an incentive to create something which they could monopolize (so they have absolute power over it). Enter the patent system. All of a sudden those aristocrats had reason to innovate (or to foster innovation THEY could control).
Over time the aristocrats were replaced with large companies (sad, but true), but the system under which large companies work is exactly the reverse of that of the aristocrats (an aristocrat needs money to get more power, a company needs power to get more money).
Now, how is power gained? Exactly, through knowledge. Now, the patent system allows you control over who gets to apply your knowledge. This control over information obstructs further development, thus obstructing competition... thus obstructing economic growth.
Copyrights, another such flawed system. It allows control over distribution of information. Where it was relevant up to 15 years ago, it's currently completely irrelevant. And it again only serves to obstruct economic growth.
If you replace copyrights with author's rights (as to ensure that the author is able to extract income from his works), I'm perfectly happy with it. Although this still obstructs the distribution of information, it doesn't obstruct the growth of information.
But alas, these completely counterintuitive ideas (patents and copyrights) won't go away, unless it's absolutely needed. In the meanwhile the bureaucracy will get worse and worse, to the point that the world economy is completely crippled and courts are clogged with patent and copyright infringement cases.
Simple Fix 1, 2, 3 (Score:3, Interesting)
2. Specify that neither business methods nor software can be patented.
3. Invalidate ALL standing patents that were issued under the previous rule.
That simple.