Despite efforts to improve, U.S. patents move slower

MILWAUKEE — A year and a half after President Barack Obama appointed an IBM Corp. executive to fix the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, its problems by several key measures have only worsened, as damage inflicted by years of congressional raids on its funding continues to make it all but impossible for the agency to keep up with its workload.

The result: More than 1.2 million patent applications, filed by inventors and entrepreneurs ranging from major corporations to garage tinkerers, are still awaiting final decisions, a number nearly unchanged from the levels of the past three years.

Also unchanged is a bureaucracy that publishes entire patent applications online 18 months after they are filed, whether or not they have been acted upon — and most often they have not, because the agency is so far behind.

That puts American ingenuity up for grabs, free to anyone with an Internet connection.

"In China, there are thousands of engineers who don't work in laboratories inventing new technologies," said Paul Michel, recently retired chief justice of the federal court in Washington, D.C., that handles patent cases. "They sit in computer rooms reading U.S. patent applications on the Internet. And they can use the technology anywhere in the world, including in America, for free.

"American economic security is threatened in a way Congress has failed to recognize," Michel said.

The Patent Office is meant to act as steward of the nation's newest and most competitive technologies, granting protection to innovative new products so their developers can commercialize them.

But beginning in the 1990s, Congress got into a nearly two-decade habit of draining funds from the agency, which is structured to be self-supporting by charging fees. So just as patent applications have become more and more complex because of the advance of technology, and as global competition exploded, the Patent Office found itself underfunded and understaffed.

Applications now languish so long that technologies can become obsolete before a patent is ruled upon. And the absence of patent protection in some cases allows infringers to steal new technologies, while legitimate inventions are unable to get licensed and start-ups are unable to get funding.

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