The most insidious error that has brought the United States to the brink of ruin is the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) and most people don’t realize why.
U.S. Patent law was written to be seen through the eyes of PHOSITA – a person having ordinary skill in the art and yet, in the USPTO almost NONE of the Examiners have industry experience and they are proud of it. I know a Supervisory Patent Examiner (SPE) who told us in a team meeting (proudly) that he joined the USPTO straight out of college and that he had only taken one semiconductor course in college and that he learned semiconductors “on the job”. I don’t think that learning semiconductors by examining application in 2800 qualifies a person as a PHOSITA and I will say categorically that a person who earned a bachelor’s degree from some rubbish dump university in India is NOT qualified to be a Director in 2800. See my main page, I had experience dealing with an Examiner Mark T. Le Art Unit 3617 who could not understand a circuit diagram and I don’t believe that he should be an Examiner in the USPTO!
But for all of you who are reading this who are NOT examiners at the USPTO, understand this: the reason China is taking over the world is in large part the fault of the USPTO.
It comes down to PHOSITA. To understand why, see the diagram above, which shows the revenue cycle. The first person to exploit this revenue cycle was Thomas Edison. He was not just a prolific inventor, he was also a prolific patenter-in-chief in the USA. Thomas Edison would have become insanely rich if it wasn’t for two problems, the first being that Edison championed DC i.e. direct current which is a loser technology. The second problem Edison had was his nemesis Nikola Tesla, who (an immigrant like me) invented a ground breaking technology (like me) namely Alternating Current i.e. AC and the rest is history. See my main page Nikola Tesla would have loved my alternating current/ pulsed power method of charging a car battery while you drive on the highway but the corrupt bastard Examiner Mark T. Le Art Unit 3617 denied the patent even though there was NO prior art, NONE! Elon Musk is like Edison, he pushed Direct Current and all the morons in the USA are buying his cars (for now).
If you go back 50 years, you will see Presidents of the United States espousing the “One China” policy meaning that Taiwan is nothing more than a renegade province of China. So why the foolish administrations of the last 50 years allowed Taiwan to procure cutting edge chip design software and chip manufacturing equipment is beyond me. I firmly believe that the Chinese Communist Party has two fingers up the ass of both TSMC and NVIDIA and that the talent pool on which TSMC and NVIDIA draw on is NOT just Taiwanese but also mainland Chinese.
Now you put in the revenue cycle and realize that we the Unites States run a deficit of almost a trillion dollars a year to China alone and put that trillion dollars into the revenue cycle and you can finally (the tubelight turned on in your brain) understand why TSMC and NVIDIA are producing as Maria Bartiromo says 90% of the cutting edge chips of the world.
So how do we solve this problem? I suggest a few ways below:
- Immediately embargo the sales of chip manufacturing software and chip manufacturing equipment to both Taiwan and China. Sadly, this may be bolting the stable door after the horse has fled.
- Put some brain into the USPTO and force every single Examiner to become a PHOSITA. This will reduce the number of patents issued and although some may feel that it will only tamp down the revenue cycle, in my opinion (because I think China/Taiwan are not that smart) it will break the revenue cycle. Nikola Tesla broke the revenue cycle for Thomas Alva Edison, we can break the revenue cycle for China/Taiwan. To do this, POTUS needs to implement the following:
- By 2030 at least 50% of all Examiners must have an earned PhD from an American university.
- Every new hire as Examiner MUST have at least 2 years industry experience.
- Every attorney or agent who practices before the USPTO MUST have at least 2 years industry experience.
- Abolish continuation applications, they are killing American businesses and are anti-competitive.
- Cut the patent fees by 80% and enforce ONLY one independent claim in each patent Application and a maximum time to process the patent application of 6 months.
- No one can become a SPE or a QAS without at least 3 years industry experience and at least a Master Degree from an American University and cannot become a Director without at least 3 years industry experience and at least an earned PhD from an American University.
- Make sure that the USPTO is NOT autonomous and that ALL extra funds earned by the USPTO each year go straight to the Commerce department because (and here is the reason), right now the USPTO is a profitable business earning a surplus every year by issuing too many patents and earning patent maintenance fees. If the USPTO is non-profit organization, then the quality will go up.
I will tell you an illustrative story that happened to me at the USPTO:
Commissioner Vaishali Udupa did a 2 part presentation on quality in office actions, the second part was presented by the Office of Patent Quality Assurance (OPQA). The training presented a slide where an Examiner received a gold certificate from OPQA for saying that a flat layer like a windshield of a car was actually a lens.
It did not seem to me that this could be a lens, because changing an existing layer into a lens has to be a 103 rejection because you are changing the function of the device, so I felt (and still feel) that the rejection was faulty, so that would mean that OPQA gave a gold certificate to a faulty rejection, so I asked this question in the training Teams chat:
“the question I have is whether or not the layer is flat. If it is flat, then it is technically not a lens since light passing through it does not converge or diverge, so the focal length will be infinity for a flat layer, a lens by definition has to have a finite focal length”
When I asked the question, I was told it doesn’t matter, this is what a SPE sent to me in Teams chat:
Personally I had no problem understanding the training, but what is mind boggling to me is that the USPTO says it does not want to “get bogged down” in technical detail during quality training, because to me quality definitely includes the technical aspects, because these patents are responsible for millions of jobs worldwide! The reason this is happening is that there are not enough Ph.D.s in the USPTO, if there were a lot more Ph.D.s at the USPTO, then we can raise the quality to a much higher level! I have not only been doing each and every one of those things they listed as quality in the presentation for the last 12 years, I have done hundreds of annotated figures, scrupulously done item to item matching, explained inherency in detail with evidence prior art and in addition I have also spent a lot of time making sure my rejections are detailed and technically correct and yet in 12 years I never received any accolades, and I know I will never get a promotion at the USPTO even though I have a Ph.D. because promotion at the USPTO is all about your race, your religion and who you know and not how hard you work !
Dear Mr. President and Members of Congress, the USPTO has become a tool for foreign countries to rob American workers of our future. The cost of labor in China is lower than the USA and if you do not take action now to remedy the USPTO, China will use the revenue cycle and the Taiwanese Trojan Horse to steal everything we have and very soon we will have NO industry left in America.