"You don't seem to understand the patent system."
1. I"m a registered patent attorney.
2. I run www.google.com/patents
3. I talk to examiners frequently
4. I spent years of my life working for patent reform in DC
Trust me, I understand how the patent system works.
The USPTO is not horribly understaffed. They have other issues. One of the main issues is actually that the patent examiners are union, and the union is not really on board with them being asked to do significantly more work (IE searching harder), unless they get significantly more pay. In a lot of cases, they can't get significantly more pay, because there are salary caps on federal employees, etc.
> The USPTO is not horribly understaffed. They have other issues. One of the main issues is actually that the patent examiners are union, and the union is not really on board with them being asked to do significantly more work (IE searching harder), unless they get significantly more pay. In a lot of cases, they can't get significantly more pay, because there are salary caps on federal employees, etc.
Is that not something you could solve with more employees? If the task does not lend to parallelization, let each team work 2k weeks on every application instead of the current k weeks and employ doubly the amount of teams.
"Is that not something you could solve with more employees? If the task does not lend to parallelization, let each team work 2k weeks on every application instead of the current k weeks and employ doubly the amount of teams."
The USPTO does not have the budget to double their staff. They are also getting pushed as hard as possible to lower pendency periods, which are already 3+ years in a lot of cases.
If they did double their staff, the union would just demand even more concession, because they would have more power, not less.
If they doubled pendency, they'd get murdered by congress.
Note that the "not searching harder" problem cuts both ways. Examiners get rewarded for moving applications off their desks regardless of whether they are approved or rejected. As such, I have seen as many frivolous rejections as I've seen frivolous approvals. One rejection I saw cited some unrelated reference and literally just made arguments up. There are no stats on this, obviously, but my anecdotal guess is examiners would prefer slightly to err on the side of rejection than approval. YMMV.
Trust me, I understand how the patent system works.
The USPTO is not horribly understaffed. They have other issues. One of the main issues is actually that the patent examiners are union, and the union is not really on board with them being asked to do significantly more work (IE searching harder), unless they get significantly more pay. In a lot of cases, they can't get significantly more pay, because there are salary caps on federal employees, etc.