Delaware judge discovers hidden entity recruiting people to be patent trolls
Current USPTO patent examiner here. The most effective way to eliminate bad patents would be to give examiners more time, say double the time across the board to start. If an examiner can't find prior art in the little time they're given, and they have no other reasons to reject the application, they'll have to grant it. The amount of time was (basically) set in the 1970s based on data from the 1960s. There have been some minor increases since then. Several orders of magnitude more prior art exists now. And while search technology has improved, it hasn't become orders of magnitude better. So I'd argue that the workload has increased dramatically since the 1970s. Simply giving examiners more time would probably greatly reduce the grant rate, and also incidentally reduce examiner stress levels. Patent examination is a tough job, as examiners rarely get enough time to do a quality job, and this leads to the high stress levels.USPTO upper management is taking comments about the "robustness and reliability of patent rights" until February. You can leave your comments here:https://www.regulations.gov/document/PTO-P-2022-0025-0001Unfortunately giving examiners more time is only briefly addressed in this request for comments. I think the public should really drive home the point that the procedural changes discussed wouldn't be anywhere near as effective as simply giving examiners more time.Don't believe examiners are overworked? Take a look at this subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/patentexaminer/(Note that this comment is only my opinion, not that of the USPTO, US government, etc.)