Biotech Values

[iwfal]

Mr. Obama astonished a group of technology executives last year when he described how the office has to print some applications filed by computer and scan them into another, incompatible computer system.

I've actually seen this sort of thing - as part of a consulting job I did for a Colombian telecom company. Their telecom system had multiple interconnected service providers (e.g. caller-area x, backbone y, and destination z) but the consumer (reasonably) only got one bill. Problem: Every service provider used incompatible accounting software and they would, literally, retype it in. (thus they were years behind and with unrepairable disagreements about the books)

Much of the patent office’s decline has occurred in the last 13 years, as the Internet age created a surge in applications. In 1997, 2.25 patents were pending for every one issued. By 2008, that rate had nearly tripled, to 6.6 patents pending for every one issued. The figure fell below six last year.

Though the office’s ranks of patent examiners and its budget have increased by about 25 percent in the last five years, that has not been enough to keep up with a flood of applications — which grew to more than 2,000 a day last year, for a total of 509,000, from 950 a day in 1997.

At some point they will have to follow, at least partly, in the steps of the Copyrights. Copyrights before about 1900 were much more centrally controlled than they are now (e.g. in order to have a valid copyright I believe you had to file with the LoC) - but then the centralized copyright system couldn't keep up with the explosion of material and had to fully decentralize and let the courts deal with any items that couldn't be negotiated between patent holders. Realistically the patent office doesn't add a lot of value at this point - lots and lots of completely obvious things are patented because the patent clerks have no way to keep up with the ever widening fields of human knowledge. (I'd love to see what percentage of patents are rejected and how dumb they have to be before they are rejected).