Patent Office Abuses

Patent Offices are a very important actor in the patent business. Most evolution in patent Law start from evolution in the internal rules of Patent Offices. And the economic game which results from patents much depends on the ability of patent offices to check the existence of prior art and to reject patents on obvious inventions.

Reality shows that Patent Office are unable to check the existence of prior art in the case of software patents or to reject obvious inventions. 90% software patents granted by the US Patent Office (USPTO) could eventually be busted because of the existence of prior art. Similar proportions were found in Europe. This creates a corrupted system where holders of invalid patents can easily threaten their competitors because the smaller ones can not face the cost of a lawsuit.

Some people, such as Greg Aharonian, believe that patent offices should do their job more carefully and that doing this only would solve the issues raised by software patents. This point of view seems to be taken in consideration, at least in formally, in the US: the USPTO has started a study to determine how to improve its reviewing process.

However, no one has ever proposed a viable system to improve the reviewing process in the case of software patents. Also, there is currently no economic incentive for the European Patent Office to reject more patents because rejecting a patent costs a lot of money while granting it creates revenue. There is even less incentives for patent examiners to reject patents since most patents are filed by companies which may actually become their next employer.

Unless a viable, self-regulated, approach can be implemented, it is very unlikely that patent offices are going to reject obvious software patents or check properly the existence of prior art.

Patent examination system is intellectually corrupt. Gregory Aharonian

This article includes detailed statistics on patent examination procedure and shows that 90% software patents granted by patent offices are not valid.

The FFII printable documents collection

This page gives a summary of the most important rules set by the EPO on software patents. It comes with a large set of examples of software patents and essential reference texts.

Patent Nonsense. The Economist. April 8, 2000.

This article includes evidences on the fact that patent examiners tend to be paid to grant patents rather than to reject them which tends to generate a lot of abusive patents.