Patent Office Back To Approving Pretty Much Anything
In the late '90s and early '00s, the US Patent Office saw a massive jump in patent grants — including tons of really, really bad patents, that have been tied up in huge, expensive lawsuits for years, wasting tons of judicial time and …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Patent Office spent much of the last decade trying to fix itself: the patent law reform debates of 2006 surfaced how earlier reforms produced unintended consequences, and in 2007 the office made an open call for outside help improving examination quality. That effort came after the late-'90s/early-'00s grant surge left a backlog of weak patents that, as Techdirt's reporting confirms, have been tied up in expensive lawsuits ever since, consuming judicial time.
The news now is that approval rates are climbing back toward the loose practices of that earlier era. It lands alongside stories like Halliburton's 2008 attempt to patent a form of patent trolling — evidence that the incentive to file aggressive, low-quality applications never went away, and that examiner pushback was the thin line holding it back.
First-order effects
- Applicants get easier grants again: software, business-method, and incremental filings face less examiner resistance, directly lowering the cost of defensive patent portfolios for large filers like Halliburton.
- Small companies and open-source projects inherit the downstream burden — more granted patents means more potential assertion targets and higher clearance costs before shipping products.
Second-order effects
- Litigation demand rises as the new grant wave matures: patent-holding firms and operating companies alike gain fresh ammunition, repeating the lawsuit cycle that consumed courts after the late-'90s surge.
- Reform advocates who engaged with the office through its 2007 open-call process lose leverage, since quality arguments carry less weight when nearly everything is approved anyway.
Third-order effects
- If broad approval persists, pressure shifts from the Patent Office to the courts and Congress as the only remaining quality filters — pushing toward post-grant review mechanisms rather than better upfront examination.
- The pattern risks re-establishing patents as quantity-driven legal instruments rather than innovation records, structuring tech competition around portfolio size instead of invention.
The trend: USPTO examination is cycling back toward permissive granting, moving the burden of patent-quality enforcement from examiners to courts and future legislative reform.