Home -> Law Blog Directory -> Patent Law Blogs -> IPBiz

Patent Law

: IPBiz

Patent quality on the rise?

By Lawrence B. Ebert, Esq.

Joff Wild has a post which includes text about work suggesting patent quality is rising:

All of this is clearly going to infuriate a lot of people. The will look for reasons why Malackowski and Barney have come to the conclusions they have: they will accuse them of, for example, being USPTO apologists or of trying to create a market for patents ? something that will help Ocean Tomo achieve its business goals. However, what the critics would be better off doing is to read through the whole article very carefully to work out whether the research that the two authors have done is flawed. If it is, they need to explain why and how the flaws distort the real picture. In other words, they need to address the message rather than the messengers.
What we have had up to now in the debate about the USPTO and the job it is doing is a lot of rumour, anecdote and conspiracy with no cold, hard evidence to back up any of the claims being made. Now, it turns out, the first empirical look at the totality of USPTO output over the last five years paints a picture that is almost completely contrary to the one the office?s critics are wont to portray.

Of course the initial hoopla of "high patent grant rates" by Quillen and Webster was based on bad legal and factual analyses.

Full post as published by IPBiz on July 13, 2008 (boomark / email).