Companies and Inventors with the Most Patents per State for 2009

US Patent Office Delaying Technology Protection

Mequon, WI, January 4, 2010 – Telaric Ideas releases its tabulation of the time it takes to get a patent.

The U.S. patent system has been the envy of the world with over 7,600,000 utility patents issued since 1836. A patent when issued provides critical protection for new innovations. However, our prized system has been crumbling for the past 15 years.

One critical measure is the ever increasing time between when a patent is submitted and when it is issued (or even rejected) by the patent office. A patent that takes over 7 years to be issued may be nearly obsolete - yet this is happening more and more. For many technologies today after 7-8 years, the next set of innovation displaces it – rendering a patent meaningless.

Contrary to popular belief, while a patent is pending the inventor has no special protection. This is because the patent may be rejected or modified by the patent office and in some cases the patent may be abandoned by the inventor.

While pending it is generally available for anyone to review it online (see http://appft1.uspto.gov/netahtml/PTO/search-bool.html). The Internet makes our newest technologies available to all our foreign competitors to copy and sell abroad and in the US. Only when a patent is issued are competitors obliged to be careful of infringing its claims.

Inventors are generally granted 20 years of protection from the date a patent is filed – not the date it is approved and issued. In a sense a patent continuously depreciates while waiting for it to be approved. So every year that goes by waiting for approval, a patent losses more value.

Telaric Ideas examined every utility patent issued by the U.S. patent office for 2009 (over 168,000 patents). The time between when a patent is issued and when it was submitted was determined. Similarly, the same was done for every patent that was issued in all of 2008, 2003, 1998, and 1993.

The current average time between applying and having a patent issued is now 3.7 years up from 2.3 in 2003, 2.1 years in 1998, and 1.6 years in 1993. Extrapolating to 2013 the average time will increase to 4.3 years or more. The 25% of patents that were issued in the shortest period of time now take on average 1.8 years to be issued, up from 1.1 years in 2003.

While, these two increases are alarming, there is a greater source of concern. 2,500 of patents took over 8 years to be issued

Many companies and inventors will find themselves harmed by disclosing their new ideas to the patent office; giving competitors many years to review, copy, use, or improve on these great new innovations.

This seriously undermines the entire purpose of the patent system – inventors revealing great new technologies in exchange for a meaningful period of time to exclusively commercialize it. The patent system is now on the edge where its operation is the opposite of its purpose – disclose your greatest technologies, allow everyone to understand and use it, and when your patent is granted in 7 years discover that the market has shifted away from the technology.