[adrian_b]

The main problem with patents today is that the patent offices validate too many patent applications that do not contain anything new or non-obvious for any professional in their field.

Moreover, there are also many patent claims that are accepted and that refer to things that are either impossible or non-economical at the time when the patent is issued, but they are put in the patent to cover future devices that someone will be able to make after the current technological problems are solved.

In the distant past, most patent offices required a demonstration with a working device in which all the patent claims were embodied, so such bogus patent claims against future competitors could not be accepted.

Now, every year more patents are issued than anytime in the past, but most of them are just garbage that was not patented before just because everyone else would have been ashamed to attempt to file such patent applications.

The number of truly valid patents issued per year now is actually less than in the 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th century.

The same as for new movie scripts, it becomes more and more difficult to find something really original to which nobody thought before.

[parineum]

>The number of truly valid patents issued per year now is actually less than in the 19th century or at the beginning of the 20th century.

This reads an awful lot like the no true Scottsman fallacy. Care to elaborate?

[adrian_b]

It is impossible to find anywhere some statistics that will demonstrate either this opinion or its contrary beyond any reasonable doubt.

Therefore I base my opinion only on anecdotal evidence.

I have read carefully a lot of patents. I have read completely a few hundreds and I have browsed through the pages of a few thousands. I believe that few people happen to read so many patents, unless their job requires precisely this.

The number of the patents that I have read has been distributed rather uniformly over the years since the start of the USPTO archive until today. Because the number of patents issued per year has increased steadily, that means that I have read a larger part of the early patents than of the most recent patents, which are probably too many for anyone to read, unless they choose a very narrow area of applicability.

Besides a lot of junk patents, I have also read a lot of very valuable patents, which marked important points in the history of technology.

However, all the really valuable patents that I have seen have been issued before 1980. I have read a few patents from the eighties that were somewhat interesting improvements of prior techniques, but I have never seen any really innovative patent issued after 1990.

The patents that I have read were not chosen randomly, but they were found either by searching for the history of various important technologies or by following the references to other patents from the patents themselves.

I believe that the patents that I have read are more likely to belong to the better patents, not to the worse. Therefore I think that the failure to find recent innovative patents in my sample is likely to be consistent with the low proportion of such patents in the entire set of recent patents.

Not all patents are junk, many present competent solutions to various technical problems, but nevertheless they do not contain anything really new, they are just new combinations of already known techniques, that could be found after some work by any competent team that would be hired to solve that problem. Such patents fail the criterion for patentability of being "non-obvious for someone skilled in the art".

There are also patents that do not cover actual inventions but discoveries of various useful things, e.g. some new alloy that was not predicted by some theory, but it was just found in a series of empirical experiments, or some bacteria that were isolated from some environment and that happen to contain a useful enzyme.

Such discoveries are very valuable, but they do not have the novelty that they had much earlier when nobody had yet clear ideas about how to search for new materials or microorganisms.

Now such searches are well understood and it is mostly a matter of having enough time and money to enable such a discovery.