Kevin Maney at USA Today had an interesting article last week on the backlog at the PTO caused by insufficient numbers of patent examiners who are unable to keep up with the ever-increasing deluge of patent applications.
Some interesting excerpts from the article:
Patent application filings have been growing 6% to 8% a year for more than two decades, so the number of applications has nearly quadrupled since 1980. About 382,000 will be filed this year.
The PTO has 4,200 patent examiners. So in 2005, 91 applications came in for each examiner. If you figure that each examiner works maybe 235 days a year, that leaves 2.6 days — 21 working hours — to review, approve and finalize each patent application if the PTO were to keep pace with the onslaught.
From 2004 to 2005, 100,000 more patent applications came in than were approved. Over the years, the backlog of applications has grown to 604,000.