Jon Dudas - Director of USPTO

Big point - mislabeling of IP as an legal asset as opposed to a business asset. 

We need to protect both the rights of businesses and individuals, but also figure out what the risks are to the legal community.

USPTO has some initiatives to help:

1) Accelerated examination - hiring 1,200 engineers a year but still not keeping up with the backlog. Can guarantee review within 12 months if applicants meet certain conditions to make the patent easy to review. One case had an approval within 17 days.

Despite pressure to focus on the "important applications," USPTO has to look at each individual one. That's their job, that's the law.

Also, despite working in a global world, patents are not global. It's country to country. USPTO is the best in the world (his words, not mine) and protection isn't as strong or institutions aren't as good in many countries. A "worldwide patent" is a long, long way off, and for good reason. Countries are not ready to give a sovereign grant of a property right away to another country. Remember, USPTO's function is in the Constitution, people. 

We do have reciprocal "patent highways" with other countries, ie Japan. 3-4 years knocked down to a few months because Japanese examiners trust U.S. examiners. We can streamline our systems by establishing trust, and we're expanding it to Canada, UK, EU, Korea, etc. 

Also working on bringing "large players" into "best practices for IP." Notes that China is a bigger player in patent applications now, and has 3rd largest patent office. Korea has 4th largest. We need to bring China and Korea "into the fold." We want to expand even further. 

Can we have a guaranteed time frame in those 5 economies? We can try. One process, high-quality examination by trusted examiners. We're also working with WIPO to make a local process more global and cost effective. 

Biggest threat is bad ideas getting into USPTO. Approval rate is around 62%, it's declined from a 72% high to 43% because they're throwing out more junk patents. 

Notes the standard is "new, useful, and non-obvious." Executives want patents because Wall Street loves more patent applications. USPTO is not so into that, especially if the applications aren't patentable. 

Standards organizations are also wondering how many patents they have to deal with. It's becoming a problem, and not promoting innovation. 

One solution: raise the price? We have to subsidize innovation, but do it the right way. Price is $1k, costs $4k. Subsidized by "maintenance fees" paid by patent holders. Less than 50% of patents are approved. So, it's easy to apply for a poor quality patent. Patent reform bill would require further due diligence. They need to justify "why does this need a patent?" 

I asked about the Sessions Amendment to the Patent Reform legislation, regarding the "Check 21" patent. Dudas made it clear that the Bush Administration opposes the amendment despite its' benefit to the banking industry (shocking, I know) because they really do want the Patent system to remain technology-neutral and not favor any kind of technology or industry.