|
August 1961 Popular Science
 [Table of Contents]
Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early
electronics. See articles from
Popular
Science, published 1872-2021. All copyrights hereby acknowledged.
|
 In today's age of massive computing power
everywhere, it is difficult to imagine needing to manually search through a three
million record database of document topics as part of a patent application process.
That daunting task faced patent application examiners in 1961 when a Popular
Science reporter interviewed the commissioner of the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office (USPTO). Yes, computers existed which could perform the task, but no effort
had been initiated to generate punch cards and/or magnetic tapes encoded with titles,
grantees, dates, key words, status, and a host of other data for use in an exhaustive
search. That was the first step in the difficult but necessary task that faced the
organization. At the time, a thousand new patents were being granted every week.
There are currently nearly twelve million patents on record. Factoid: Per the
USPTO's 2023 Annual Report, the duration of protection for a patent is only
20 years - from the date of filing, not granting, while that of a copyright
is 70 years after the death of the author. Trademarks last 10 years, but are renewable.
At the end of FY 2023, the USPTO workforce comprised 13,452 federal employees, including:
8,568 patent examiners, 756 trademark examining attorneys, 225 administrative patent
judges, 28 administrative trademark judges.
Is the U.S. Patent System Doomed?
 "I don't mind telling you flatly, unless
a solution to the search problem is found soon our patent examination system is
in danger." The speaker is the new boss of the patent office, David L. Ladd. Commissioner
Ladd is the very model of the current administration's executives: young (35), husky,
good-looking, smart, fast-talking, and informal (shirt sleeves, feet on the desk).
In an exclusive interview with Popular Science, he outlined his plans. He is
seeking ideas to ease the lot of the independent inventor (such as a preliminary
application form, to be filed as soon as an idea is conceived, that would automatically
prove who was first and eliminate protracted, expensive "interference" proceedings).
But, he says, "The search problem comes first."
That problem is easy to state, very tough to solve. A U.S. patent can be granted
only for a genuinely new invention. To make sure it is new, examiners must literally
search through the earlier patents. This has always been difficult. Now, with 3,000,000
patents in the files and 1,000 new ones being added every week, it is becoming impossible.
The only way out is searching by machine. The machine doesn't exist yet, although
Government and industry have been pushing hard, because a couple of crucial items
need to be invented. One necessity is a good reading device - to convert the 3,000,000
existing patents into punch cards or magnetic tape that the searching machine can
search through. Another necessity is some basic discoveries about language - how
is the machine to tell if "bridge" means highway bridge, spectacle bridge, or a
card game?
If machine searching is not perfected, Commissioner Ladd foresees fundamental
- and undesirable - changes in the patent system. The French patent office doesn't
try to search, he points out - there you have to fight out conflicts in the courts
(a special disadvantage to independent inventors, who are usually broke). The English
search, but disregard all patents more than 50 years old. Comments Ladd, ''I'd hate
to have a blanket rule cutting off all patents at the end of 50 years. Some of those
German chemical patents from the late Eighteen Hundreds are just now coming into
commercial use. It would be unfair to let late-comers re-patent those old ideas."
More than the patent system is involved. The whole world needs the searching
machine. Libraries are running out of space. And they are already so big that you
can't 6nd anything in them - it's easier to rediscover needed information than to
look it up. Patent searching is the most complicated kind of information retrieval,
however. Ladd says, "If we can solve the problem for patents, we solve it for everything."
Posted May 3, 2024
|
