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Fluffeh writes:
"In June, President Barack Obama called for action against patent trolls. Today the White House held a short conference updating what has happened in the arena of patent policy since then and announced new initiatives going forward — including one to 'crowdsource' the review of patents.
Currently, getting a patent is a one-on-one proceeding between the applicant and the examiner. Two pilot programs that allowed the public to submit prior art were only applied to a tiny number of patents, and in the first program, all the patents were voluntarily submitted by the applicants. Applying such scrutiny to a few hundred patents, out of the hundreds of thousands issued each year, isn't any kind of long-term solution.
Unless the crowd-sourcing initiatives were to put major new burdens on applicants — which would be resisted — the fundamentals of patent examination aren't going to change. Patent examiners get an average of eighteen hours to review a patent. Most importantly, examiners effectively can't say 'no' to applicants. They can reject a particular application, but there's no limit to the number of amendments and re-drafts an applicant can submit."
(Score: 4, Insightful) by frojack on Saturday February 22 2014, @11:36PM
If examiners can't say NO, then there would be no such thing as a rejection.
So clearly they do say NO quite often.
A lot of patents are applied for and on average only half are granted [uspto.gov].
(Utility Patent Grants, All Origin Total / Utility Patent Applications All Origin Total * 100)
Its easy to see that if the rejections were all re-filed every year, within a few years there would be nothing but refiles in the queue.
Filing for a patent requires you to provide all prior art and explain how your invention does not violate that. This alone weeds out a lot of patent applicants, because they, or their patent lawyer, figure out that the effort will be fruitless in the long run.
A rejection is hard to overcome, and often when they write up their re-file, what remains of their claim after working around the infringements or prior art isn't worth the effort.
Only the biggest firms (often pharmaceuticals) have the resources to do so.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 5, Informative) by frojack on Saturday February 22 2014, @11:47PM
Oops, I reversed the math. Oh, well you will figure it out.
Still less than half of all applications are successful dating back to 2001.
Prior to 2000, more than half were successful.
The biggest drop came in 2005, the year the "Obviousness" [wikipedia.org] standards went into effect. Successful applications have never reached the 50% mark since.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.