Disadvantages Of Patent Backlogs

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Patent backlogs are counter-intuitive and damage the patent program. Purposes of the patent system are to promote the sharing of innovative ideas, inventions, and technologies. If a patent idea is sitting in a backlog, the inventor may never get investment funding and the idea may never be implemented or realized. Certain industries and technologies evolve quickly and waiting on the backlog could cause losses or affect the usefulness of the patent. Other negative side effects to a long patent backlog is companies may decide that the wait for the patent application to be approved is too long and keep the idea as a trade secret. Patents help spur innovation and scientific technology improvements because the idea is shared and described for the…show more content…
The problem with bad patents is they will be litigated in the court system and cost large sums of tax payer money, potentially more than the cost of hiring additional workers. In my opinion, it has led to overly broad patents. Patents such as the shape and design of the iPhone and the placement of icons. [3]Any functional touchscreen device would need to have a rectangular design. It would be impractical to say Apple owns this design and anyone who wants to make a competing device must be a round or a square device. I think this backlog helps feed patent trolls that attempt to patent overly broad ideas and then require licenses or sue companies. Much like the troll under the bridge, patent trolls are costing the economy billions of dollars a year and are stifling innovation. In 2009, the estimated cost due to patent trolls was 29 billion dollars in 2011[4].…show more content…
J. Ackerman, “Prioritization: Addressing the Patent Application Backlog at the United States Patent and Trademark Office Patent Law: Note,” Berkeley Technol. Law J., vol. 26, pp. 67–92, 2011. [2] M. Mejer and B. van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie, “Patent backlogs at USPTO and EPO: Systemic failure vs deliberate delays,” World Pat. Inf., vol. 33, no. 2, pp. 122–127, Jun. 2011. [3] “The Apple-Samsung Patent Wars and Our Broken IP System,” The Baffler, 02-May-2014. [Online]. Available: https://thebaffler.com/latest/the-apple-samsung-patent-wars-and-our-broken-ip-system. [Accessed: 22-Feb-2018]. [4] E. Von Hippel and G. Von Krogh, “Free revealing and the private-collective model for innovation incentives,” RD Manag., vol. 36, no. 3, pp. 295–306, 2006. [5] A. Palangkaraya, P. H. Jensen, and E. Webster, “Applicant behaviour in patent examination request lags,” Econ. Lett., vol. 101, no. 3, pp. 243–245, Dec. 2008. [6] “Google’s machine learning software TensorFlow goes open source,” FRPT- Softw. Snapshot, pp. 16–17, Nov. 2015. [7] A. Géron, Hands-On Machine Learning with Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow. O’Reilly Media, Inc., 2017. [8] M. Abadi, “TensorFlow: Learning Functions at Scale,” in Proceedings of the 21st ACM SIGPLAN International Conference on Functional Programming, New York, NY, USA, 2016, pp.
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