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Comment by jjoonathan | Hacker News Reader

USPTO is entirely funded through patent fees. They get more fees if they approve a patent.

No, I am not joking: https://www.uspto.gov/about-us/performance-and-planning/budg...

There's your problem.

That is not the problem. Just because an agency is funded by fees does not mean that it has perverse incentives nor corruption (though it can be the case). After all, the FDA has to assess all of Pfizer's drug applications -- do you want to pay for all that out of your income tax, or should Pfizer be paying it? Furthermore, the USPTO has had the same issues described here long before they were self-funded by congress.

The problem is that that the USPTO doesn't have enough money to hire inspectors and officials. They are woefully, desperately underfunded. The same problems that plague the USPTO also plague the IRS, and for the same reason. The USPTO would do much better if they were permitted to double the fees, or more, for patent application.

Former patent examiner here. The main problem with quality is as you describe: patent examiners don't get enough time. I've written about this before on HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31197809

Note that increasing fees alone won't necessarily change anything if USPTO management doesn't give examiners more time in response. For example, the USPTO charges applicants extra if they have more than a certain number of claims (20, I believe), but examiners only get 1 hour extra if there are more than that number. I once had an application with 45 claims... I estimate that I only got around 23 hours total for the first "office action" on that one (most of the work), and that includes the extra hour I got. So I got 5% more time for 125% more work!

Edit: Here's the application with 45 claims that I worked on: https://patents.google.com/patent/US20190160529A1/en

> That is not the problem. Just because an agency is funded by fees does not mean that it has perverse incentives nor corruption (though it can be the case). After all, the FDA has to assess all of Pfizer's drug applications -- do you want to pay for all that out of your income tax, or should Pfizer be paying it?

The FDA gets billions in funding from the government and the USPTO does not. I'm not saying you are right or wrong about the problems regarding the USPTO but to compare its funding to the FDA is disingenious and wrong.

The FDA used to not be funded by the pharmaceutical industry, and instead be directly funded. There are routine questions about how the current arrangement influences FDA decision making in a way that negatively affects their ability to independently review drugs. IOW: the current setup causes the FDA to approve things they probably should not have approved, because they are incentivized to "get along" with the companies paying them.

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