The Effect of Application Fees on Entry into Patenting (nber.org) 29
The abstract of a paper published on National Bureau of Economic Research: Ensuring broad access to the patent system is crucial for fostering innovation and promoting economic growth. To support this goal, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office offers reduced fees for small and micro entities. This paper investigates whether fee rates affect the filing of applications by small and micro entities. Exploiting recent fee reforms, the study evaluates the relationship between fee changes and the number of new entrants, controlling for potential confounding factors such as legislative changes. The findings suggest that fee reductions alone are insufficient to significantly increase participation in the patent system among small and micro entities.
Lawyer? (Score:1)
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In the last decade or so, the message has been to patent ideas. There are some benefits on being first. You do not even need a product, or either a promise to a product, to patent an idea. It takes several years from a patent being filed to a patent being granted.
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No lawyer is required, you can do it alone. Read the procedure and process, and what parts a patent document should have. The research part is easier these days with the patent search tools on the web.
I imagine the young would find it more difficult to do than we boomers, much study and careful composition in writing is required.
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What chance does a patent written by a layperson have of standing up to the scrutiny of a big corporate patent lawyer that really wants to steal your idea? I wouldn't trust myself to write a patent meant to fend off a big corporation any more than I would trust myself to write a legally binding contract over something even remotely non-trivial.
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Filing a patent does not require a lawyer. I am not a lawyer or patent agent and have written patents for my own inventions. But I'm not a typical inventor. I've worked with lawyers to review thousands of patents and have worked with them to write dozens, including doing the drawings and drafting claims.
But with that said, it's incredibly difficult and time consuming, so usually wise to use a lawyer. Which costs anywhere from $5000 to $20,000. So saving a couple hundred dollars in filing fees doesn't m
Missing the real costs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Missing the real costs (Score:5, Informative)
You cannot lose a patent by failing to defend it; that's something from trademark law.
Your options for getting licensing fees and damages might become limited if you ignore some infringements, but it'll still be your patent.
If a patent that has been granted is actually useful, it'll be easy to sell to someone that has the resources to defend it. OTOH, preparing and writing a patent is a very expensive and speculative activity, and that's probably the main impediment for most people.
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Yeah, if anything, abstaining from defending a patent and keeping a low profile, can make it worth more. If you can get other people to use your patent in a standard or something else widespread, then you're set. Wait until it's well-adopted commercially, then surface the submarine and start firing torpedoes.
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You don't have to defend a patent against infringement to keep it. That may be sorta true for trademark, but is not true for patents. "Defend against infringement" isn't even a thing. A patent holder can chose to enforce or not enforce their rights as the patent holder as they see fit, They can enforce absolutely, selectively, or not at all. Immediately, or delayed.
Who knew? (Score:3)
I wonder how many small and micro entities could possibly have been aware the fees had been reduced for them?
And if they weren't aware, how could it have possibly changed their behaviour?
I suspect the Patent Office was fully aware of this. Had it driven a huge upsurge in submissions, that would have almost certainly been accompanied by a dive in the quality of submissions, as hiring a good patent lawyer is by far the main part of the total cost. Any increase attributable to lower fees would likely correlate strongly with those that didn't hire a good patent lawyer. The Patent Office would surely hate getting a flood of poor quality applications, so I suspect wouldn't have done this if they had any expectation this would be the result. Therefore the most likely explanation is that this experiment was motivated not by a desire to boost applications, but by a desire to justify their current fees.
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The lack of effect may simply be due to the "big" fee still being pretty low. Had there been another zero or two on the full fee then they may have found a difference.
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As someone who has filed with large corporations, small, and micro, it's kinda hard to miss. It's a box you can check on the payment options.
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Misunderstanding the purpose of patents (Score:3)
Many people have this notion that if you are granted a patent, "the government" will protect you from others trying to copy your invention. The reality is that a patent give you the right to sue others for infringement. It has always been up to you, the patent owner, to enforce the patent through lawsuits, a process that has been expensive for a long time.
Most patents are garbage. They are almost always nullified by prior art. https://ipwatchdog.com/2017/06... [ipwatchdog.com] Making it cheaper to file patents, only increases the amount of garbage, because it takes effort (money) to confirm that your "new idea" really is new. Most patent filers have an inflated sense of their own inventive prowess, and assume that because they've never heard of a thing, it can't possibly have been dreamed up by someone else. In most cases, they are wrong.
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Most patents are garbage. Plus the patent office has a high workload already. Throwing more garbage on the fire does not seem helpful.
In my experience, patents are a lot about a unique set of words and busy patent spaces end up with a lot of word salad. Good luck having them "teach" you something.
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Based on what I've seen in my technical area, your conclusions on the quality of most patents are correct. Many granted patents should have been rejected either for prior art or for lack of technical details. The article cited posits that the review process is broken based on the number of claims rejected on appeal. I tend to agree but there is a conflict of interest as the USPTO is self-funded. A reduction of the number of issued patents would decrease the renewal fees generated. Thus, the Office has a ves
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If USPTO is motivated to accept invalid patents for financial reasons, they would also be motivated *not* to lower fees for small companies and individuals who apply for patents, as these lower fees would eat away it the revenue it would otherwise generate. If it has to run patent applications at a loss, it certainly doesn't help the bottom line of the USPTO.
Do you really need a patent? (Score:2)
You should really ask yourself if you need that patent. You might just be better off with a trade secret. There may be benefits to spending your focus and your cash on building your product.
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There are important defensive uses of patents as well. You can make it much less likely that your company will be sued for patent infringement if you have a useful patent that the other company either violates or is interested in. Many patent suits end even before they start in cross licensing agreements.
Also, under the "first to file" system filing a patent application is just about the only reliable way of preventing some other entity from claiming your invention, especially if they have any similar res
10k to 20k in lawyer fees to get a patent issued.. (Score:2)
In my experience it takes (on average) somwehere between 10 and 20 thousand (USD) to get a patent applied for and issued (They always come up with some bogus reason for it to not be issued, and you have to go back and forth with the examiner a few times making inconsequential changes before they will issue the patent. Can take anywhere between 5 to 10 years from application to issue.
The fees paid to the patent office are tiny compared to the other costs.
Pro Se effect? (Score:2)
Is the situation like that of criminal law; where going in without a lawyer is typica
Fees are wrong issue (Score:2)
While making patents is painful, it's learnable.
The problem is patent searches. I think current AI patterns are really overblown and was just lied to by one two days ago.
BUT in this case, what the patent office really needs is chat-GPT-like AI trained on the current patent body. That would really help on previous art searches.
We currently have lawyers doing searches, and they don't understand what to search for or what's relevant. It's costly, produces massive false positives, clearly doesn't find all re
Self-funding (Score:1)
If the patent office is going to be self-funding (and it should), then filers should bear the actual costs of processing. If they want to set up some kind of court-style public defender system to pay for filing costs for those who are less able to cover the costs, I suppose that's fine, but there are enough problems with the patent system to consider subsidizing its fees.
But as others have said, there are already legal costs for writing patent descriptions and other expenses that dwarf the filing fees (plus
Difficult for Individuals to Aquire/Defend Patents (Score:2)