Roadblock at the U.S. Patent Office - 700,000 applications in the pipeline

Here is an excerpt from a SiliconValley.com article about nanotechnology patent applications but also gives a sense of the backlog at the US Patent Office,

As the time it takes to process patent applications now averages almost four years, double the time it took in 2004, nanotech entrepreneurs are beginning to worry that their ability to raise money to develop products may be stifled.

“Clearly there’s a danger,” Stephen Maebius, a partner in the Foley & Lardner law firm, said of the patent application backlog. “If you cross a threshold and it’s taking too long, potential financial backers wonder if what you have is patentable or not.” [...]

For example, patent applications are published about 18 months after they’re filed, Gotcher noted, which gives competitors information about your intellectual property before you have a patent protecting it. [K: I am not a lawyer, but I think the idea is still "protected" with an earlier "priority date".]

“It gives your competition a clear view of what you’re doing,” Gotcher said. “It lets them modify their claims and sets the stage for future intellectual property fights. Having less than a timely response from the patent office is a big deal.” [...]

“We have 700,000 applications in the pipeline,” Kisliuk [K: director of a patent examining group at the patent office] said. “Some are for nanotech, some not. This backlog isn’t unique to nanotech.”

After years of being starved for resources, the office hired 1,200 new examiners, bringing its total strength to nearly 4,800 examiners. While nanopatents are getting more complex, that’s also true of everything, Kisliuk said.

“Technology generally has grown more complex,” he said. “A century ago, a third of the patents we issued concerned bicycles.”

Incidentally, Richard Feynman studied and played in the area we now call Nanotechnology decades before it became popular. And Dick even created two fun $1,000 prizes, on “nano” motor and “nano” printing, to attract attentions to the area. Sooner than Dick had expected, he had to pay up on the two $1,000 prizes even thought the methods of arriving to the solutions didn’t require any new technique to be developed. By the way, I used “nano” in quotes because they are really just “small” as oppose to “nano”.