05.13.14
David Kappos Fatally Killed Quality at the USPTO and Killed Fairness in Industries as a Result
Legacy of Obama and monopolistic corporate players
Summary: A look at what happened to the US patent office under Obama and under the leadership of IBM’s pro-software patents mole, David Kappos
THE awful USPTO hardly needs discrediting; it discredits itself. This is the office where almost every silly idea that a small child can come up with becomes a patent. It’s not even a joke, it’s factually the case.
Some people are obviously digusted by such Obama appointees like David Kappos and one of our readers called it “revolving door”, noting the following article that unmasked the real rate of acceptance of patent applications (nearly 19 out of 20 get accepted):
Yes, President Obama’s Patent Office Started Approving Basically All Patent Applications Again
Want to know why there are bad patents? Because there’s no such thing as a true “final rejection” of a patent (i.e., you can always keep refiling and try, try, trying again and again until it’s approved) and because the former head of the Patent Office, David Kappos, saw it as his main challenge to get rid of the giant backlog in getting patents approved. And thus, soon after Kappos took over the USPTO, we noted that patent approval rates started shooting upwards. Over the previous six years or so, the approval rate had been in a gradual decline, with it really starting to drop off around 2004, just as the Supreme Court started hitting back on a bunch of bad patent rulings, and making it clearer that, no, not “everything under the sun” should be patentable. However, Kappos never appeared to view patent quality as important, merely patent quantity and ending the backlog — and thus, the patent office started to take an approve anything mentality.
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Basically, in 2013, the true allowance rate for patent applications was 92% (much higher than the USPTO’s officially reported number of 54%). The discrepancy is because the USPTO’s number counts “rejections” for patents as if the patent was truly rejected, and doesn’t look at how many patents actually make it through the full process.
People should lose their respect for patents granted by the USPTO. These don’t deserve much serious attention when every silly thing becomes a patent. Software developers should waste not even a minute looking into individual software patents. A system so corruptible will, sooner or later, be defeated. Fairness in competition will be greatly harmed by what companies like Microsoft and IBM made out of the USPTO. █
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