Eric Waltmire was quoted in an article titled “The Future Is…Later: A backlog of applications at the U.S. Patent Office has innovation in a stranglehold” [link] at Entrepreneur.com. The article described the difficulty some inventors have had resulting from the long delay between the date the application is filed and when the patent office examines the application and ultimately decides whether a patent should issue.
The article notes that currently, on average, it take more than 25 months to get a first office action from the Patent Office on a patent application and 32 months before an application issues into a patent. Moreover the article notes Secretary of Commerce Gary Locke acknowledged that “This [delay] has a direct, negative impact on America’s economic competitiveness–creating uncertainty for entrepreneurs and inventors.” Locke has a goal of reducing the average time period before first office action to 10 months, which is very aggressive.
In the article, Eric explains that companies seeking to leverage intellectual property as a key asset to attract funding are the group that is the most impacted by the backlog. Read the whole article here [link].