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NY Times on patent reform, inequitable conduct

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Within a New York Times article titled Patent Law Battle a Boon to Lobbyists, one finds the recent argument by Jon Dudas:

Jon W. Dudas, the under secretary of commerce for intellectual property, said: ?We are getting more and more unpatentable ideas, worse and worse quality applications. Historically, in the last 40 years, the allowance rate ? the percentage of applications ultimately approved ? hovered around 62 percent to 72 percent. It went up to 72 percent in 2000, but dropped to 43 percent in the first quarter of this year.?

Of various discussions involving Mike at TechDirt, one notes that the Dudas statement is based on the low allowance rate of the first quarter of 2008. There was a high allowance rate in 2000, which was all right for Dudas, but not all right for Jaffe and Lerner. The Dudas position is that bad applications have always been rejected, but that is not at all what Jaffe and Lerner said. What Jaffe and Lerner said does NOT presage the comments of Dudas, which are based on a phenomenon of first quarter 2008 (and which may have been "artificially" created by the USPTO).

Full post as published by IPBiz on April 30, 2008 (boomark / email).