Revolutionize the PTO

Just about anyone who has had to deal with the US Patent & Trademark Office will readily agree that a major overhaul of this part of our government is needed, preferably as soon as possible. A significant portion of our economy is dependent on the principals of intellectual property protection and the PTO owns all of the passageways into these strange lands. With a wave of a pen fortunes are made and lost when a patent office action grants an idea the status of property, or takes it away.

The debate continues to rage (not least within this blog) regarding the merits of different types of patents, and the merits in particular of software patents. But both sides of this argument can probably see that the PTO as currently configured is in no condition to render intelligent judgements on a consistent basis as to the patentability of various software innovations.

At dinner with a friend last night, I heard the (not uncommon) story of receiving an official PTO office action memorandum, rejecting all claims for a filed patent due to the existence of "prior art" -- which is to say, someone else patented the idea first. However, upon review of the cited prior patent, the only conclusion a reasonably trained computer scientist could come to was that the rejected patent application and the prior patent both used the word "meta data" a few too many times and otherwise were not at all similar.

A Revolutionary Suggestion
In thinking about how he had arrived at this state, and whether the Patent office personnel were merely using a word search on prior patents to reject claims, my friend made an interesting observation: the business community as a whole has a vested interest in blocking the issuance of bad patents (that is, patents for ideas that are not, in fact, innovative), the business community has the resources and the knowledge to properly investigate a patent claim and uncover prior art -- why not have an open review process for patent claims?

This would radically change the role of the patent office from one of research to one of adjudication. Patent officers would have to determine whether or not the counter claims that competing businesses raise against a patent's issuance were accurate. But this role of adjudication would at least remove the patent official from the now almost impossible job of coming up with the potential prior art themselves.