Weiss On Patent Reform in Boston Globe

The backlog at the United States Patent Office is 1 million applications long. This means that it takes almost 33 months for examiners to decide up or down on an application’s status. For sectors like communications where innovation moves at a particularly brisk clip, that “patent pending” period can be 44 months—a virtual eternity. A slow patent system gums up the gears of innovation, Rick Weiss argues in today’s Boston Globe:

Prolonged patent pendency is one of many problems in the US patent system that the Obama administration and Congress should aggressively address in 2009. Patent examination rules, including the time allotted per application, have not changed since the 1970s, even though inventions today are far more complex. The information technology system that examiners use is antiquated. And the patent office has barely taken advantage of the option of sharing its workload with other patent offices around the world, which today redundantly examine identical applications filed in their respective countries.

For Weiss’s full analysis of how to initiate pragmatic patent reform: “Tackling the Challenge of Patent Reform.” For an overview: “Patent Reform 101.” Nancy Scola also reported on one system that could help examiners issue better patents faster: “Better Patents Through Crowdsourcing.”

Tags: Innovation, intellectual property

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