Some time next month, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will issue patent number 10 million. Whether aggressive patenting promotes or stunts innovation is far from a settled debate. But the impending milestone is being marked as an occasion for celebration of American innovation. Patent number 10 million will be issued with a new patent cover design, which was unveiled on March 11, 2018.
Of the nearly 10 million patents issued so far, nearly five million are with the current cover design, which was adopted in 1985. It took 121 years to issue the first million patents (1790-1911), but just four years to move from patent eight million to patent nine million (2011-2015) and three years to move from patent nine million to 10 million. In 1991, the number stood at five million. The idea of granting limited monopolies for new inventions written in the Constitution of the U.S. Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8 charges the U.S. Congress “to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.”
The first patent, in 1790 was signed by President George Washington himself, in favour of Samuel Hopkins for improvements in “the making of pot ash and pearl ash”.
The rise of digital technology in recent decades has resulted in an explosion of patents and a dramatic rise in silly patents and litigation. Alongside the phenomenon of social media trolls, ‘patent trolls’ are also now an integral part of the network economy. “A patent troll uses patents as legal weapons, instead of actually creating any new products or coming up with new ideas. Instead, trolls are in the business of litigation (or even just threatening litigation),” according to the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, which houses the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents. It also runs a ‘Stupid Patent of the Month’ blog. Mark Cuban, the well-known tech investor, started the chair after seeing the rise of silly patents.
Flying machine
The Wright brothers, who flew the first “flying machine” in North Carolina in 1903, are often described not merely as pioneers of flying but also of ‘patent trolling’ in America (picture shows a page from their patent application made in 1903). Early 20th century had a battery of aviation innovators, but the Wright Brothers challenged them all. They claimed rights over any machine based on the principle of aerodynamics that they discovered, while their competitors claimed the theory of physics was the common property of humanity and the Wrights’ patent pertained only to the mechanics of their airplane itself.
The brothers bogged themselves down by litigation, while others expanded the technology. In 1915, when Orville Wright sold his interest in Wright Co., the aircraft it made were considered dangerous and obsolete. In 1917, Franklin D. Roosevelt, then Assistant Secretary of Navy, pushed for the creation of a ‘patent pool’ that enabled American aviation industry to cooperate among themselves.
Ironic about the current era of patent trolling is that the underlying technology of most of it, the World Wide Web, is not patented to anyone. Tim Berners-Lee, widely considered to be the inventor of the Web, does not think that he deserves that much credit. Mr. Berners-Lee decided to never commercialise or patent his contributions to the Internet technologies. “I was just taking lots of things that already existed and added a little bit,” he said in 2004.
It took 121 years to issue the first million patents (1790-1911), but just four years to move from patent eight million to nine million (2011-2015) and three years to move from nine million to 10 million
