USPTO: an agency in crisis

[PILCH Hartmut <phm@a2e.de>]

Financial Times has a feature article


  The Exclusive Right to Stagnate
  
http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?pagename=FT.com/StoryFT/FullStory&c=StoryFT&cid=1045510979794&p=1012571727092

by Lawrence Lessig, which takes the European Swpat debate as a
starting point to draw attention to the deepening crisis of the
US patent system:

  As pressure mounts on the European Parliament to extend patent
  protection to software, a crisis is developing in US patent law that
  Europe would do well to consider. The system in America is broken - to
  the great detriment of software developers generally - and there is no
  reason to believe the Europeans could do any better.

  The claim that the US patent system is in crisis is nothing new. What
  is new is the identity of those making it.

  ... now the Patent Office is singing a different tune. As its new
  head, former Republican Congressman James E. Rogan, said in an
  interview with the L.A. Times on February 7, 2003: "This is an
  agency in crisis and it's going to get worse. It doesn't do me any
  good to pretend there's not a problem when there is."

  ...

  Software developers are quite aware of these costs. Yet economists
  have found it very hard to reckon any net benefits. And thus
  conservatives are increasingly sceptical of this form of
  regulation. No doubt it has produced "a whole cottage industry of
  shysters," as Mr Rogan admits. It is harder to show that patents
  have produced any gain that would justify their costs.

One might add the Kober interview of 2002-12 in which the EPO
president said that software patents are a bad idea.  This however
does not mean that either the USPTO or the EPO have changed their
position.  The McCarthy proposal to make software patents obligatory
in Europe contains rhetoric which comes from the EPO, and high EPO
representatives, just like Rogan, continue to chant the tune "no
patents, no innovation" and to deploy dozens if not hundreds of peole
for pursuing the expansive political interests of their organisation.
But patent inflation (explosion of quantity, ever-lower quality,
every-larger backlog) have generated an impact at least on the rhetoric of
some of the leading people.

-- 
Hartmut Pilch, FFII & Eurolinux Alliance              tel. +49-89-12789608   
Protecting Innovation against Patent Inflation       http://swpat.ffii.org/
135,000 signatures against software patents      http://www.noepatents.org/