Founding Partner
written by Elizabeth Gearhart, Ph.D., Patent Agent at Gearhart Law
www.GearhartLaw.com
We all want more transparency from our government, don’t we? Well, the USPTO heard our pleas, and they’ve launched a ‘Patents Dashboard’. It shows a variety of stats for recent months, and some for previous years too. You can see how long it takes for each step of the patent process, and what the backlog in applications is, along with other types of data. Right now, there are a little under 600,000 applications waiting to be examined. Entrepreneurism is alive and well in the US! Scroll down and you can also see that the number of patent examiners has gone up in September, to 7,931 compared to 7,778 in August. That means the United States patent system generated at least these153 new jobs in a month, and probably many more if you count other businesses that use or depend on the patent system. Don’t worry, it’s not your tax dollars paying those extra PTO salaries, it’s filing fees and other fees (the patent office is self-sustaining). The increase in examiners also means that your patent application may get examined a little sooner than it would with fewer examiners on staff.
To me, these stats show how important entrepreneurs and inventors are to the American economy, which I believe is one of the best places for innovators and visionaries.
You can access the Patents Dashboard at:
http://www.uspto.gov/dashboards/patents/main.dashxml