New patent regime won’t help
See my op-ed piece in the National Law Journal at http://www.law.com/jsp/nlj/PubArticleNLJ.jsp?id=1202466286056&rss=nlj&slreturn=1&hbxlogin=1
When they say it’s about the money, it’s not about the money
Congress has had the hubris to sap fee revenue from the patent office for years. Whether it was punishment for bad performance or avarice that motivated this nutty practice, it may be dead. Complaints by the patent office (and its customers) paid off yesterday when the President signed a token Congressional payback of $129 million (around 6% of the patent office’s budget) ( http://appropriations.house.gov/images/stories/pdf/Full/2010_USPTO_Supplemental_Appropriations_Bill-HR5847.pdf).
This was not a bold and risky legislative move–every dollar being paid will be recovered in fee revenue. Still, it is progress.
Director Kappos blogged (http://www.uspto.gov/blog/) effusively about the projects that could be funded by the infusion. The money will pay for more examiners, overtime, faster re-engineering of the patent examination process, and IT projects, among other things. Good news, I guess.
Yet, this flow of money back to the patent office should remind us of the big-elephant question in the room (the same question triggered by some of the recent initiatives and reports by the patent office): Will money solve the problem?
The supplemental appropriations bill provided no guidance on what to fix or how to fix it. And no measure for gauging success by the patent office. Can a 200-year-old bureaucracy solve what are possibly intractable problems without Congress rolling up its sleeves and giving some hard-nosed explicit legislative instruction to the patent office?
Even with more money, can the patent office successfully dispense what Director Kappos calls “the vital role our Agency plays in supporting innovation and in spurring job creation and economic growth?”
Or, as I wonder, is it not about the money?
