Hollinden on Open Letter to the New Commissioner of the U.S.P.T.O.
Gary E. Hollinden, Ph.D., a former Patent Examiner for the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO), writes an open letter to the new Commissioner on how to fix some of the USPTO’s problems. In a nutshell, the USPTO is short on money and examiners and is performing poorly on most congressional goals. In this Commentary, Mr. Hollinden provides several points of action and discusses how to implement them. He writes:
The gap between the total number of applications your (remaining) examining corps can process and the number of applications that need to be processed has been growing steadily as the number of applications has increased and the number of examiners to process them has not kept pace. The unprocessed applications from years past pile up and add to each new years' crop of applications-not-processed creating logarithmic pressures on pendency. Moreover, like the federal deficit, as the pile of applications-not-processed grows each year they create an ever greater drag on future budgets since the PTO has most of the fees that they will receive on those applications-not-processed while your costs to examine and issue them have barely started. Thus, the ever-increasing pendency also represents an ever-increasing pressure on future budgets.
. . . .
First and foremost, the primary mission of the PTO is to promote invention, not make money. However, . . . the PTO is apparently running out of money quickly and money is needed to pay bills and salaries. Because of these budget woes, the PTO has been taking drastic measures to reduce costs (including suspending examiner hiring indefinitely). In this severe budget climate, you may believe the prudent and practical thing would be to forestall any reforms until the budget situation improves. However, I would suggest to you that waiting to address the problems I have outlined . . . will simply result in progressively worsening budget problems with each successive budget cycle. Left unattended, problems such as the large overhead of the current training system or the problem of inadequate management oversight have a direct impact on pendency, patent validity, and budget costs and they also exacerbate other problems (such as increased examiner departures) which then have their own negative impacts on pendency and budget. Most importantly, having a U.S. Patent & Trademark Office budget in the black and a pendency of 26 months before a FAOM [first action on the merits] is a mission, not a success. Another important point when considering new program costs is that the positive impact of instituting new (well designed and properly implemented) programs can go beyond their direct impact on budget and pendency to produce a positive synergy on core mission goals.
(footnotes omitted)