It’s no wonder the US economy is tanking. Intellectual Privilege Rights are holding back innovation, competition, affordable goods and services, research, development and startup businesses.

The first time this bogus study showing a 98% approval rate was referenced, I let it go, but apparently it is being taken as gospel, so it is time to point out that the study is wrong.

First, the study does absolutely nothing to take into consideration restriction by the USPTO. What is a restriction? When the USPTO deems that the claims in an application cover more than one invention, the USPTO issues a restriction requirement,tell the applicant: You have three inventions. Pick one to be examined. The referenced study appears to count submission of each invention as a “resubmission” rather than being the equivalent of a new application. How many applications get a restriction requirement? I have not seen any studies. Anecdotally, I have seen as few as 1 out of 10 applications get a restriction requirement, but I have also run into series of applications where 3 of 5 applications get restriction requirements.

The other thing the study fails to consider is “omnibus” applications. Preparing patent applications is expensive, so it is common for companies to deliberately put multiple inventions relating to one device into a single application, and then filing divisional or continuation applications to cover the separate inventions. I have seen one patent application ultimately end up being ten different applications, each covering a different invention. This study appears to count each application, erroneously, as a “resubmission.”

With such massive erroneous assumptions, the issue rate could easily have been OVER 100%! Before researchers create bogus, meaningless, and erroneous studies, they really should know what they are studying.

When I was a child, I pulled a leg off a grasshopper, and yelled at it. Th grasshopper tried to jump away. I kept repeating this process until the grasshopper had no legs. At this point, the grasshopper no longer moved. Conclusion? A grasshopper with no legs is deaf. Bad science, bad study.

It is misleading to say that applicants can just keep trying and trying to get the same patent, as this article argues. Once you are rejected, you cannot stick with the same claims, and keep arguing the same thing until you “get the patent.” You usually don’t get anything like the patent you wanted in the end if you stay with it that long in the face of rejection. Instead, your application is cut to pieces, until what you’re getting is worthless much of the time. Big companies will persist and take whatever they can get, but so what? 99 percent of patents don’t make a dime. Every time I see one of these bandwagon anti-patent articles I think “they should talk to a patent lawyer.” If you don’t know what you’re talking about, and still blunder ahead, you wind up used by those who do. A few powerful companies are presently trying to maintain their advantage by eliminating competition from new people. Patents help new companies get a foothold and challenge them, despite their superior size and strength. They get sued by little guys. They don’t like this, so they have been lobbying, manipulating the media, and brainwashing the public with distorted half-truths like this article. At the same time, these companies were built on big patents – Google pagerank, anyone? The anti-IP atmosphere in Silicon Valley hangs thick with hypocracy. The patent system is in place in every modern economy for a reason – we would not be anywhere near where we are technologically without it. They even understood this in ancient Greece, where an early form of patent originated and stoked economic growth. People will not work hard to build something if a big, bad actor can just immediately steal it and squash them for their effort. They need protection to have a chance to grow and fly – like a baby bird. Or we can just have Apple/Google/Facebook and nothing else, because they’ve destroyed the upstarts’ IP with this misinformation and lobbying, or acquired them with impunity thanks to an antitrust division that they’ve also strategically weakened. No one in their wildest dreams in the 40s, after Rockefeller, would have believed that Exxon and Mobil would be allowed to merge. Yet it happened with no issue from Justice. Now, they’re taking apart the patent system with “reform” after “reform.” The big guys own this country inside and out. The individual has been enslaved to just work for them, one way or the other, and that should trouble every one of us. We need a diverse group of tech providers, open to competition from new people. The patent system gives them a fighting chance against the 800lb gorilla if they have created something new, useful and nonobvious – Not anything “under the sun” as that phrase is misconstrued in this article. That phrase relates to fields of endeavor under section 35 USC 101, not all patentability requirements. Research what a term of art means before you criticize it. Patent examimers are hard-working, smart people (like Albert Einstein, for example, before he was famous). They do a difficult, thankless job that only gets more thankless with incorrect insults to their work quality, like this article.