Eighteen months after President Barack Obama appointed former IBM Corp. executive David Kappos to fix the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), problems have only worsened, according to key measures reported in Milwaukee’s Journal Sentinel. Damage inflicted by years of congressional raids on its funding has made it all but impossible for the agency to keep up with its workload. The result: More than 1.2 million patent applications, filed by inventors and entrepreneurs ranging from major corporations to garage tinkerers, still await final decisions — a number nearly unchanged over the past three years.

Also unchanged is a bureaucracy that publishes entire patent applications online 18 months after they are filed, whether or not they’ve received action. That puts U.S. ingenuity up for grabs, free to anyone with an Internet connection. “In China, there are thousands of engineers who don’t work in laboratories inventing new technologies,” says Paul Michel, recently retired chief justice of the federal court in Washington, DC, that handles patent cases. “They sit in computer rooms reading U.S. patent applications on the Internet. And they can use the technology anywhere in the world, including in America, for free. American economic security is threatened in a way Congress has failed to recognize.”

Just as patent applications have become more complex because of advancing technology, and as global competition has exploded, the USPTO has found itself underfunded and understaffed. Applications now languish so long that technologies can become obsolete before a patent receives a ruling. Consider:

* The USPTO took 3.82 years on average for each patent it issued last year, up from 3.66 years in 2009 and 3.47 in 2008, according to an analysis of Patent Office data. That’s more than twice the agency’s traditional benchmark of 18 months to deal with a patent request.

* The total number of applications awaiting a final decision, representing new technologies ranging from pharmaceuticals to engine designs, remains stuck at 1.22 million — nearly unchanged from levels of the past three years.

* The agency imposed a hiring freeze in 2009 and lost examiners into most of last year, unable to replace them because of budget constraints. Since 2005, it has aimed to hire 1,000 to 1,300 new examiners each year but only began to hire again starting in August 2010.

* In 2010, the first full year under a new reform-minded administration, the USPTO collected $53 million in fees that it was not allowed to keep, according to limits imposed by Congress. In addition, Congress has failed to approve the agency’s 2011 budget or any agency fee increase, so the Office continues to operate at 2010 budget levels with a deficit of more than $1 million each business day, according to agency officials.

Kappos argues that progress is being made. He points to the USPTO’s tally of applications awaiting an initial review, which fell to 708,000 at the end of the 2010 fiscal year, down 1.5% from 718,835 a year earlier and down from a peak of 764,000 in January 2009. The USPTO regards the decrease as significant given the reduced number of examiners and the nearly half-million new applications that flowed into the office last year. “Even with fewer people and an increased filing rate, I’m actually happy that we were able to bring the backlog down a little bit,” Kappos says. “We’ve got a long way to go, but we were able to make a little bit of progress last year.”

Source: JSOnline

Posted January 26th, 2011 under Tech Transfer

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