USPTO is committing its time and resources to improving patent quality now

If the problem is low-quality patents crowding out high-quality ones, the solution would seem straightforward: increase the quality of patents before they are issued. And indeed, the USPTO is working to do that. The agency has begun to devote more time to the upfront examination of patents and, in a 2022 Federal Register Request for Comment, signaled its exploration of new responsibilities to ensure that applications filed are “robust and reliable” through greater clarity and support for submitted claims.

But there’s a catch: there is a tension between high patent quality and broad access to the patent system for first timers and entrepreneurs like Parrott. That’s because improving patent quality takes time and money. It takes effort on behalf of patent applicants to define the terms they’re using and clearly delineate what they consider the invention. It takes time to do prior-art searches and ensure the claimed subject matter is truly novel and nonobvious. And solutions like the one Lemley et al. proposed in Regulation of “paying for a thorough examination of their inventions” take, well, money.