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Patent reform would be best, but just changing the incentive system would do a world of good. IIRC the patent office is funded partly by fees, giving it motiva
by russell 16y ago
Patent reform would be best, but just changing the incentive system would do a world of good. IIRC the patent office is funded partly by fees, giving it motivation to quickly grant patents. Declining patents throws a monkey wrench into the revenue stream. Examiners get lower evaluations if they do too much of this. Fix it by changing the funding, fining for denied claims. Give bonus points to examiners who deny patents/claims.
Citations needed: jump in if you have fresher knowledge.
- lincolnq 16y agoBonuses to deny claims? Doesn't that swing the incentives the opposite way? I bet there are plenty of reasons somebody could come up with to deny any given patent. But some of them are genuinely valuable inventions and deserve protection. So I'm not sure this is the right path.
- russell 16y agoYou are right of course. The trick is to move the incentives to get the desired result. If the system is fundamentally chaotic, a simple tweak would result in all claims being denied. Or 90% of all patents being denied would probably not be a bad thing. If OTOH, the system is quasi-stable, correcting the incentives would remove the aberrations. Incentives tend to push the results to conform to incentives. But I also believe that it a fallacy to expect predictable results from a social system, thereby contradicting my above assertion.