The U.S. Patent Office is sitting on a mountain of applications that would take at least six years to clear, the
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel found in a two-part investigation.
The newspaper points out that a patent could be the key that protects an upstart company or idea. It could ignite the economy, but the backlog of applications means an inventor can wait at least three and a half years to get action.
The
Journal Sentinel contends the Patent Office's practice of publishing detailed applications on its Web site 18 months after the inventor files them -- regardless of whether the office has begun to examined them -- invites competitors anywhere in the world to steal ideas.
The investigation also found:
- "For more than a dozen years starting in 1992, Congress siphoned off a total of $752 million in fees from the Patent Office to pay for unrelated federal projects, decimating the agency's ability to hire and train new examiners.
- "As its backlog grew, the Patent Office began rejecting applications at an unprecedented pace. Where seven of 10 applications led to patents less than a decade ago, fewer than half are approved today -- a shift that a federal appeals judge termed 'suspicious.' The same judge calls the agency 'practically dysfunctional.'
- "Staff turnover has become epidemic. Experts say it takes at least three years for a patent examiner to gain competence, and yet one examiner has been quitting on average for every two the agency hires.
- "Patent activity, a widely accepted barometer of innovation, is showing exponential growth in increasingly competitive economies such as China, South Korea and India. As developing economies strive to commercialize and protect their technologies throughout the world, they add tremendously to the U.S. Patent Office's workload.
- "In many cases, applications languish so long that the technology they seek to protect becomes obsolete, or a product loses the interest of investors who could give it a chance at commercial success. 'Patents are becoming commercially irrelevant to product life cycles,' said John White, a patent attorney and former examiner."
The Journal Sentinel suggests that American entrepreneurs are being caught in a Catch-22: Startup companies often need a patent to get funding; yet without that funding they can't afford the legal costs and other fees to keep the patent application alive or to fend off copy cats.
The newspaper's Web site makes it easy to localize this story:
"What technologies are generated in your city? Who’s the most prolific inventor in your state? ... You can
use this searchable database to explore how your city, state, country or industry fared in 2008."
