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Comment by vishaldpatel | Hacker News Reader

It mentioned in the article that it costs the patent office more money than what they charge for processing patent claims. Why is that? Why don't they just charge the full amount?

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Today, you can file a patent for under $1,000(not including attorneys fees) depending on how many claims and drawings you have. If they charged the $10B they said it costs to review the number of applications they get now(around 500,000) your $1,000 becomes $20,000. At that price most independent inventors couldn't(or wouldn't) file. Remember that the entire purpose of the uspto is to encourage innovation and if it costs you a year's salary to get a patent on something that might not ever make you a dime then you're not going to be encouraged to innovate.

> Remember that the entire purpose of the uspto is to encourage innovation

While patents could in principle be reformed, in practise any reform is unlikely to work because people would game the system. The best way to encourage innovation would probably be to abolish patents altogether.

Abolishing patent system would be an overkill, but shrinking it, say, ten-fold, would help.

Why not just have an escalating fee system? Make it cheap for the first few submissions and increase to above the actual cost as the number of submissions for a single entity increases. (And put provisions in to avoid ownership by proxy submissions, or at least to make those approaches comparably expensive.)

I specifically do NOT want to see patents for "innovations" that would never make a dime.

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