In op-ed, Chris expresses frustration with slow patent processing

In an op-ed appearing on HuffingtonPost.com today, Senator Coons reports on the Patent and Trademark Office's decision to call off a program scheduled to begin this week that would have sped up the devastatingly slow speed patents are processed in the United States.

"The pace of American innovation far exceeds the pace of American bureaucracy," Senator Coons wrote in an op-ed on Huffington Post today. "If you were looking for ways to limit economic recovery, stifling PTO’s ability to grant patents would be pretty high on the list. Fee diversion is effectively a tax on innovation, punishing the very people we ought to be empowering."

The root of the problem is a little confusing, but here it goes.

Similar to the Postal Service, the Patent and Trademark Office is funded by the fees it collects. But its budget comes from Congress, so every year, PTO has to ask Congress for a budget that matches what it thinks it will collect in fees. It's a guess.

If it actually collects less in fees than projected, it would have to spend less than what was budgeted. But if it collects more than what was projected, they have to turn that money over to the Treasury... instead of using that money to hire more patent examiners to clear through the massive backlog of 700,000 patent applications stuck at PTO. 

The backlog is so big that if you filed a patent application today, an examiner wouldn't even see it for two years and you wouldn't receive a decision for three. Three years! Studies have shown a single patent can create between three and 10 jobs. In this fledgling economic recovery, this is a HUGE problem.

The big-picture fix is the America Invents Act, which Chris cosponsored and which passed the Senate overwhelmingly in March. It cleared the House Judiciary Committee last month but a vote on it hasn't been scheduled yet. That needs to happen quickly.

PTO came up with its own short-term fix -- a clever pilot program that Congress approved that would allow up to 10,000 businesses and individuals who needed their patent in a hurry to pay a significant extra fee that would allow PTO to staff-up appropriately. It wouldn't slow down patent-processing on the normal track, just create a separate track for expedited consideration.

So PTO projected it would take in $40 million for the pilot program and included that in its budget request for FY11 since if that money wasn't approved by Congress, it wouldn't be able to spend it on staffing up. Then came the showdown on spending cuts and the near-shutdown. The deal authorized PTO at its FY11 level -- not enough to allow the pilot program to proceed.

Last week, PTO had to abandon the program.

America needs the jobs these patents would create, so now it needs the House of Representatives to pass H.R. 1429. As Chris wrote, "Congress' delay in ending patent-fee diversion is costing America jobs at a time when we desperately need to be getting more Americans back to work. We need to move more good ideas from the PTO's inbox to the marketplace."