[throwawaykf]

Agreed. It is an unfair match. It is, statistically, almost a tautology: The set of examiners is necessarily limited by government funding constraints, but the number of patent attorneys and agents they contend with on a daily basis is only limited by the market, which is huge. The examiners will eventually be overwhelmed.

I think this is one reason that most examiners (at least IME) have their default mindset to "Reject! Reject! Reject!" Also, this is why something like Ask Patents is invaluable to even the odds.

I don't agree with the quantitative approach, but I can't help think that technology can help. Google has already (in my opinion) helped the PTO greatly narrow claims the past decade; similar technology can help even more.

I have some background in NLP. And I know it's surprisingly effective when it comes to domains with specific jargon (cf. Watson and medical language). I've lurked long enough to know some here (such as VanL) have already experimented in this area. Personally, I have toyed with the idea of constructing parse trees out of multiple technical texts and claims, "normalizing" them using ontologies, and trying to find matches (i.e. prior art) using various tree-matching algorithms. I have a feeling it would be very effective. (Maybe Google already does this!)

But that does not address the problem of identifying patents that are quantitatively invalid but qualitatively valuable. To me, that is the more important long-term problem.

[kazagistar]

Increase the filing fee, to pay for better examiners directly? Patents that cost a few thousand dollars?

[pbhjpbhj]

This weighs against individuals too heavily. The UK for a time had a zero filing fee but they've gone back to a small fee again (to avoid getting so much chaff).

It's the renewal fees where you should be charging highly IMO; hyperbolic year-on-year increases would be an interesting option to model.

[xmodem]

I know this sort of thing is unpopular in the United States, but how about a pay-according-to-your-means model? So individual inventors working for themselves could file quite cheaply, but a publicly held corporation with a >$1b market cap pays a much bigger fee for the same thing.

[bstpierre]

Or perhaps even a pay-based-on-number-of-filings model. First application is $500, with a doubling for each filing, up to a max of $10k. (Or whatever multiplier and ceiling you want to have.) For small filers, the legal fees will dwarf the USPTO fees; for large filers with dedicated legal assets, the USPTO fees are still fairly minor but might start to be large enough to deter some of the frivolous filings.

[pbhjpbhj]

How much does it cost to set up a shell corp, $50?

>For small filers, the legal fees will dwarf the USPTO fees //

You can self file; though it's not generally advisable. $10k isn't even a blip for someone like HP who (at least in the past) markets themselves on the number of patents they have.