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."
Therefore (Score:5, Funny)
Pay me, bitches.
Re:Therefore (Score:5, Funny)
Patent #1094398532 - One click approval (Score:3, Funny)
I'll license it back to them for a fee.
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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!
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Really though, with the years you've invested in your engineering degree would you want to go straight to a paper shuffling job right out of school?
Re:What they told me (Score:4, Informative)
And as for that, it's not my main choice, but it's better than no job.
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I wonder how efficiency ratings are measured? If it's number of patents processed, then there is an incentive to rubber stamp applications (pass a lot, fail a lot, or come up with a semi-random scheme).
Really though, with the years you've invested in your engineering degree would you want to go straight to a paper shuffling job right out of school?
IIRC, they're expected/required to process 5 applications a week (avg 8 hrs/app), probably averaged over some time frame, regardless of how long the application is. And yes, both your concerns are valid: because of the quota, there's no incentive to do a good job, just to do it quickly; and the people that would know the most about this are least likely to want to do it.
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Re:What they told me (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a built in incentive for bad patents to get through. Patents get rubber stamped simply because of the need of efficiency to get out of the whole backlog mess. Instead of actually diligently checking and rechecking for prior art conflicting patents, the employee stamps it as good, as fast as possible, and walks away with their 10% bonus. This seems to be the same problem that tech support has with call tracking. The faster a person gets you off the phone, the more money they make, and the faster they get promoted.
Re:What they told me (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking at this job I am almost tempted to apply. The money is good even without the bonus. It would be interesting and varied work. And one would be in fine company, as Mr Einstein himself was once a patent clerk.
But I would last all of 5 minutes before getting fired. The problem is as computer scientist and inventor and someone who knows the difference between an abstract idea and well thought out and unique implementation that solves original problems I would have to apply ethical standards to my work.
Got a business patent? In the bin it goes.
Got an existing idea you want to add the words "web browser" or "computer" to? In the bin.
Only got mathematical algorithm? No language specific implementation? In the bin.
You want to add a tiny specific modification to an existing idea? Sorry, in the the bin.
Something that I can find published on Google with trivial searching? In the bin.
Well, you might think my manager would be happy as a pig in shit, praising a wonderful worker who is clearing the backlog by rigorously applying the rules. Wouldn't you?
Oh, but wait... Where does the patent office make its money? Approving patents.
Which is why the rules were changed to allow all this crap through in the first place. There aren't suddenly more ideas in the world, the bar for patentability has been drastically lowered and the system is broken because of it.
So, how about this for an idea. If he approves a patent that is subsequently challenged and voided the clerk loses twice their bonus and the patent office has to refund the application fee in full. And to make sure the applicant doesn't benefit from specious claims, they must pay a fine of 10 times the application fee to the government.
Then let's see who is so quick with the rubber stamp.
What is needed is incentive to find _good_ patents. To add this incentive, how about a royalty type bonus system. A clerk who approves a patent that runs its full term gets a small bonus at the end of its life, related to how much money it has actually made through the sale of real products (litigation payments would be excluded).
Re:What they told me (Score:5, Informative)
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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 th
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Actually, I think you would do quite well at the patent office, or anywhere else in the Bush administration. You seem to think that an executive-branch bureaucrat (patent examiner) should be able to independently a
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If you enter as a GS-5 your production quota is 60% of the nominal GS-12(100%) production quota for the expectancy assigned to the docket that you will be working in (varies by art). By the time you make Primary Examiner (GS-14) you have to crank out 135% of the GS-12 expectancy. That's a factor of 2.25 more. In a recent GAO Report [gao.gov] recent hires who are leaving the PTO in droves cited "outdated production goals" as one of the leadi
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All I ever heard about that place was horror stories. There are quotas for how many patents you need to process per week. Managers regularly abuse those examiners who can't keep up. "Keeping up" requires approximately 10 to 20 hours of unpaid overtime per week.
And it's all mind-numbingly repetitive work.
This was a smart girl, 3.5+ GPA, never slacked off, and she couldn't handle it. If you decide to accept the offer,
Re:What they told me (Score:5, Informative)
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This is for all graduates, regardless of location. Many graduates end up in New York state however.
Re:What they told me (Score:5, Informative)
Enjoy.
Cost of Living? (Score:2)
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Some products cost the same in different parts of the country. Gas is fairly close right now across the board. It's cheaper in New
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An EE/CE/CS graduate who successfully cross-trains in paralegal skills to do the job, at that. Gee, wonder why they can't hire or keep enough people to handle the workflow...?
old news (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/10/07/AR2007100701199_pf.html [washingtonpost.com]
Examiners don't quite do anything anyway (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, I know. (Score:2, Informative)
I have an application 12 months into a 30 month queue. In a fast-moving field, this is a huge headache. My previous patents only took about a year to get to first office action.
There's a new express program, though. If you file no more than three claims, file online, and do a more diligent search, the USPTO promises to process the patent in less than a year. That was just starting when I filed, and I didn't take that option.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
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Cheaper for whom? The government pays the patent examiner. The patent holder and the patent challenger pay the costs of litigation.
Re:A giant rubber stamp is needed (Score:4, Insightful)
Is that what it's going to come down too[sic]?
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
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I was with you up, to this point, sorry.
1.) Not all patents are submitted by domestic entities.
2.) The trend in America towards a service industry, like the patent system issue, is not a new development - fresh engineers will come in lesser numbers, not more.
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Engineers are part of a service industry. They don't actually manufacture anything, they're info workers. Fresh engineers will come in greater numbers when their education budget is less risky from both scholarships and more jobs when they graduate.
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You clearly have no idea about what you are talking about. The Patent Office is the only agency that makes money (patent applicants pay more money in fees than it costs to run the Patent Office) so the people are not subs
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The main reason those court cases are so many and so long is that the PTO isn't vetting nearly enough bad patents at application time. My system would help defray thos
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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 inven
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$1 for the first year
$10 for the second year
$100 for the third year
$1,000 for the fourth year
$10,000 for the fifth year
$100,000 for the sixth year
$1,000,000 for the seventh, and final year
If the smalltime inventor hasn't sold the patent or started to make money by the fifth year, he is never going to and doesn't deserve to block other people out of the market. Plus, the scaling rate means that only directly profitabl
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There's not going to be a fair fee on that kind of scale. If I patent something that cost me $20,000 to invent, and $20,000 a year to market, but "advanced science or the useful arts" so much that it took that investment just to finally sell $30,000 worth in the fifth year, then that $10,000 is going to make it a lot harder to get my return. Any amount that's just a fi
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It sounds like a job program for accountants.
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And the bounty syste
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Maybe if every agency wasn't so busy pouring $TRILLIONS into the Pentagon and CIA budgets, there'd be more to go around.
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Perfect example of the Republican denial projectors who have spent all our money on the Iraq War while leaving the PTO in ruins. They don't want to confess that they voted twice for Bush, who created both those problems as a way of "drowning government in a bathtub" (named "Katrina").
Somehow just mentioning the CIA and Pentagon's $TRILLIONS in wasteful budgets drags out of them some bizarre bleating about Hit
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False. The military is only part of the "national defense" budget, which is only 21% of the federal budget. This includes the FBI, CIA, NSA, DHS, Coast Guard, FEMA, foreign aid, and lots of other non-military spending. "Entitlements", such as social security, medicare, etc. make up 61% of the budget. 22% goes to pay for healthcate (Medicare + other healthcare combined).Source [washingtonpost.com].
Of course there are lies, damn lies, and then statistics. Feel free to go through th
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Of course it would require the current Executive to go (to hell), before the PTO could be rebuilt. The current priorities tend to corporate anarchy, with the PTO redesigned to print anticompetitive corporate IP documentation without the constraints that engineering would bring, with technicall
Solutions? (Score:2, Interesting)
A possible solution (Score:5, Funny)
DELETE WHERE ToLower(body) LIKE '%on the internet% (Score:5, Insightful)
Knock out software patents, and patents on processes, and blamo! problem solved.
-Rick
Re:DELETE WHERE ToLower(body) LIKE '%on the intern (Score:4, Insightful)
Deny any patent with the words, "A method to..."
Problem solved. I bet the backlog drops by at least 3/4 what it is today.
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Sure. But you'd throw out a lot of legitimate patents. A patent covering e.g. "A method to produce chemical X..." which goes on to specify the method (not one which uses that verbiage to cover all methods, as do many bad patents) is not a bad patent, unless you're opposed to all patents.
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It is plausible to say that a sequence of instructions is not an invention. What makes "a metho
Wow (Score:2, Funny)
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 obvio
Re:God I want this Problem (Score:4, Funny)
If they start outsourcing to India, we'd probably see a lot of new inventions coming out of India
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Thats because they are allowing.... (Score:2)
they are probably underestimating the backlog
It's just the math... (Score:2)
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To me, maths dictates that if the patent office hired 12,000 examiners this year and did so for the next 5 years, the problem described would begin to decrease at year 3 and disappear at year 5. That would be an achievement by US standards. Why don't these officials just do this grade 9 math?
That would cost them more money. People are still going to apply for patents no matter how long it takes, so they really aren't losing much (financially) by keeping the backlog, whereas it would cost them ~600-700k/yr in salary to do what you suggest to kill the backlog.
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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
why check them at all? (Score:3, Interesting)
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Here's an idea... (Score:2)
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.
Karma (Score:2)
well, what did you expect ? (Score:2)
How to clear the backlog (Score:4, Insightful)
Step 1: Hire more patent officers.
Step 2: Raise the price of applying to meet costs of #1.
Step 3: Once backlog is clear create stricter application process.
Step 4: Based on number of man hours required for new process introduced in 3, raise prices again.
Step 5: Review demand now that it costs more and is less likely to success; adust staffing to meet new demand.
How many Patent examiners does it take to screw... (Score:2)
Hmmmm, I don't think they know how to do that, no matter how many.
They seems to persist with in the darkness of believing software and business methods are of patent-able subject matter.
Re:How many Patent examiners does it take to screw (Score:3, Informative)
The examining corp, nor the office itself ever allowed software patents, rather it was a court decision
see State Street Bank & Trust Company v. Signature Financial Group, Inc., 149 F.3d 1368 (Fed. Cir. 1998), 47 USPQ2d 1596
Three step patenting process (Score:2, Insightful)
2. Process the patent applications.
3. Validate - check, verify, grant.
Whoa... most of you don't understand business! (Score:2)
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!
Abolish Software and Business Method Patents (Score:2)
Also, require a prototype within a reasonable amount of time, or no patent. It takes no real resources to draw a picture and write a description. The patent itself should not be the product that you profit from. If you have no intention of creating anything with your patent (or helping others to create with it), then you have no business having the damned thing.
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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!
From a Patent Examiner's Perspective (Score:2, Informative)
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 arist
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.
Re:Software patents (Score:4, Interesting)
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Software patents are stupid.
Software's just an implementation like anything else - gears, pulleys, etc. The more our economy and innovation tends toward information-based research, the more patents *should* be novel algorithms and such. That has nothing at all to do with the quality of the software patents now being approved, but it doesn't mean that an invention that is implemented in software is inherently bad.
The business method patents...I'm not willing to say they're all inherently bad, but the b
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Re:Software patents (Score:4, Insightful)
In principle, not evil at all. The idea is that the government will grant you a limited time monopoly on your invention, provided you document everything so that once your time is up, anyone can create and improve on the idea. This is in contrast to trade secrets, where you get to keep your invention for as long as you can keep it a secret.
(As a side note, the NSA has cheated this system, where some of their algorithms are currently a trade secret, and will suddenly become a patent if they're ever revealed).
The system today has severe implementation flaws, but the idea behind it is brilliant.
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=Smidge=
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.
Re:Software patents (Score:5, Insightful)
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Not infallible, just very very wise compared to modern people. They had plenty of issues, not the least of which were moral perspectives that have been proven dead wrong (slavery for instance). However, even though they had their faults, they seem to have had a much better grasp on what makes as good government than those who are in/modifying our government(s) today. They understood basic things like the passive tyranny of religion and state being mixed together. They understood the evils of having too
Re:Software patents (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes, no Internet.
Maybe the patent system is broken if it does the opposite of what it suppose to do then?
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But hey, all they had to lose was their lives, families, and infant country. We've got $trillions wrapped up in this stuff today!
Re:Software patents (Score:5, Insightful)
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Essentially, fitting the founding fathers' idea of America gets equated with legitimacy in the minds of most Americans. The part that makes it acceptable is that arguments that fall on the side of the founding fathers usually aren't wrong; it's just so much easier an
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Yet where do we draw the line? What makes an invention "physical"? A prototype? Some patented devices are literally the size of buildings, or otherwise intended for a one off construction, so demanding a prototype is sometimes unreasonable? Many software algorithims and even business methods are at times even more ingenious than man
Re:There is no real issue. Problem solved. (Score:4, Informative)
Even with all the cash they have, they can't hire enough to get them back to even.
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the reason there is a backlog is because they can't keep the examiners they have. they had a hiring freeze a couple years back as the budget didn't get resolved.
they are being reactive to issues from a couple of years ago. if they could keep the examiners they had, you wouldn't have the rest of the examiners taking over the actions of all those who left, thus not working on new applications and increasing the backlog.
the office tried changing the rules too, in order to speed up the backlog by limiting
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Patent requests: 400$ * 1,300,000 = +345,000,000$
RIAA support: 55,000,000
Physical infrastructure costs: 1 * 10,000,000 = -50,000,000
Execs: 2,000,000 * 7 = -35,000,000
Coordinators: 500,000 * 10 = -15,000,000
People who we don't know what they do (Management??): 80,000 * 300 = -24,000,000
Political bargaining: -35,000,000
M
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