Intellectual Property: Drowning In Ideas

A search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's Web site for the word "treadmill" turns up references to 354 patents dating back to 1978. The Patent Office's search engine distinguishes between the treadmill's original patent (No. 4,066,257), which describes a storable exercise device, and one of the more recent patents (No. 6,749,542), which describes in detail a more sophisticated version of the device. There are patents for treadmills for dogs and sheep, as well as three for aquatic treadmills.

It's an exercise that shows not only the prowess of the Patent Office's technology but the challenges the agency faces in the coming years as the number of patent applications grows, and its resources stay constant. Indeed, "treadmill" may have a different meaning for the Patent Office's 3,800 patent inspectors as they try to keep pace with the rising application volume--about 355,000 last year, compared with 278,000 five years ago--and increased pressure from the software industry for faster approval of their much-coveted intellectual property.

The Patent Office has a backlog of 500,000 applications and an average wait time of 27 months for patent approval. But with tech companies such as Microsoft looking to increase their patent applications, the Patent Office could face a backlog of 1.5 million applications by 2010, says Bruce Lehman, senior counsel with Washington, D.C., law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer and Feld and U.S. commissioner of patents and trademarks from 1993 through 1998. "The expansion of patentable subject matter is also increasing the workload, to the point where the office is reaching a crisis," Lehman says. "An increasing backlog creates a lot of uncertainty in industry, particularly in a changing industry like software. The office must avoid a situation where it's issuing patents for technology that's already out of date--a situation that affects the technology industry's freedom to innovate."

Decades ago, the Patent Office identified IT as crucial to improving processes and gaining efficiencies. Now the agency sees technology, along with sound policy and procedures, as the best way to come to grips with a business environment that's placing a high priority on intellectual property. "Intellectual property is becoming more of a strategic asset for companies that operate both in the U.S. and abroad," says Douglas Bourgeois, who served as the Patent Office's CIO for three years before leaving last month.

Microsoft chairman and chief software architect Bill Gates said during a July financial analysts meeting that his company plans to file more than 3,000 patents in fiscal 2005, a significant increase in the "something over" 2,000 filings the previous year. Though the company ranks about 30th among patent holders in the United States, it intends to move into the top 10.To help keep pace with the rising number of applications, Bourgeois, who is now director of the Interior Department's National Business Center, focused on upgrading security policies and technology to meet federal standards, developing an enterprise architecture to define how the office's technology is developed and deployed, and implementing a storage area network to support its massive online transaction database.

The ability to support this database using a SAN means the office has a pool of storage resources that can be diverted to wherever they're needed rather than attaching new storage devices to each database server. "If we'd done this initiative using our previous storage architecture of adding capacity to individual servers, it would have cost us $22.4 million more," Bourgeois says. The Patent Office wants to make full use of its SAN by creating "wrapper code" around patent files that will let electronically filed data move through the IT systems from one end to the other.

Many of Bourgeois' marching orders were dictated by the Patent Office's 21st Century Strategic Plan, introduced in 2002. It's designed to prepare the office to accommodate increasing processing demands while cutting the amount of time patent examiners must wait to get a response from the office's database, which contains data on nearly all of the 7 million patents issued since 1790. However, in recent years, Congress has been diverting patent-application revenue to the general treasury to help cover the country's budget deficit, hurting the office's ability to hire new examiners and keep up with the growing number of applications, Lehman says.

While technology isn't a substitute for trained examiners, it can expedite and ensure the integrity of the review process through online application filing, public key infrastructure data security, and enhanced database-search capabilities, says Edward Kazenske, deputy commissioner for patent resources and planning. "In some cases, technology is the only way massive amounts of data can be reviewed," he says.

Bourgeois' successor will be responsible for integrating the Patent Office's online efforts with those of European and Japanese patent offices, given that they publish 90% of the world's patents. "Our goal is to provide access to each other's files while we're in the examination process so that we can review their work and identify what their examiners have done," Bourgeois says.At a June Business Software Alliance meeting in Washington, D.C., Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the efficiency of the Patent Office is crucial to helping software companies combat piracy. The goal, Ballmer said, should be to balance the ability to review and approve patent applications with the volume of requests.

The goal of the Patent Office's next CIO will be to help patent examiners, and the agency's 500 IT professionals, find a way to strike that balance.

Photo by Dennis Kitchen/Stone