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They would have to increase patent application fees... | 661 comments | Create New Account
Comments belong to whoever posts them. Please notify us of inappropriate comments.
Insurance
Authored by: Anonymous on Thursday, March 28 2013 @ 01:36 PM EDT
A Farmer has to deal with the risk of weather, they can sell
options. For the risk of illness, fire, accidents, theft we
have insurance. Is the only way to mitigate patent risk to
gather your own for a counter strike?

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

They would have to increase patent application fees...
Authored by: Ronny on Friday, March 29 2013 @ 11:34 PM EDT
It would then be necessary for the charge for issuing a patent to reflect the
possible cost of getting it wrong.

The patents portion of the PTO budget appears to be in the near region of
$2.5B/annum. Of that, initial examinations comprise about 50% of the budget. If
I'm reading the budget papers correctly, that's funded entirely by patent fees.

If I'm reading the stats correctly, court awards in patent cases are around the
$20B/annum mark at the moment. (This excludes settlements.) Around 5000 cases
per annum with an award of around $4M. ($4M is a median unfortunately, couldn't
find a mean quoted.)

As such, doing this would increase the charge for issuing a patent by a factor
of about 15.

This would certainly reduce the number of bogus patents issued, but would make
it uneconomical for "small" inventors to get a patent granted. If
you're paying $50-100K to get your patent approved, you're betting a year's
salary on the chance that your patent will make money.

Basically it would directly contradict the mission of the PTO to promote the
useful arts. Wouldn't happen.

[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]

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