Last year alone there were nearly 400,000 patent applications. The U.S. Patent Office simply cannot keep up. The Patent Reform Act of 2005, currently making its way through Congress, attempts to make it easier to challenge granted patents and more difficult to sue for patent infringement. Its most sweeping proposal would have the system favor the person who was "first to file" rather than the person who was "first to invent." This would benefit large companies with patent-filing bureaucracies over individual inventors. It would also vastly simplify the system by eliminating the need to identify the original inventor and therefore speed up the time it takes to process a patent. 

Proving that you were the first to invent something can easily cost more than $1 million in legal fees and drag on for months. On the other hand, the negligible $100 filing fee, along with the decrease in legal hurdles, would create an even greater incentive to file patent applications, and the system would become more overloaded than it is now. People would rush to file claims even before completely figuring out their inventions. 

A much better solution would be to make the screening process more rigorous and selective. This could be done in several ways: 1) Hire more patent examiners (the patent office is already doing this). 2) Pay them more to attract the most qualified candidates. 3) Stop Congress from diverting hundreds of millions of dollars in patent fees to other programs. 4) Open up the examination system so that knowledgeable, interested citizens can raise objections. 5) Set up a peer review system to assist the patent examiners. Participants could look at applications in their field of expertise and flag ones that should be thrown out for being too obvious or derivative. Safeguards would have to be put in place to avoid conflicts of interest. But it would be interesting to inject an open-source culture into the patent review process. 

(Business 2.0, 9/2/05)