USPTO Getting Paupers To Hand Over Thousands On The Dream Of Patent Wealth
from the here-we-go... dept
Patently-O has the somewhat horrifying story of the USPTO cashing the maintenance check for a patent holder, but then letting the patent expire because the check was $10 short. The guy apparently owed $1,040, but sent a check that was only $1,030 (and he used the wrong form and sent it to the wrong dept., but...) and the USPTO still cashed it, but declared the patent abandoned for not having paid the full maintenance fee. The guy only discovered this a few years later when he called the USPTO to get ready to send in his next maintenance check. Anyway, the article notes that CAFC smacked down the USPTO for this practice.You can read all the gory details at the link above, but what struck me about this was two things. First, the guy paid the $1,030 to maintain this patent (and it doesn't appear he did much with the patent during that time) and then was ready to dump another chunk of change into maintaining it, but when he found out that the USPTO (yes, arbitrarily and somewhat dickishly) had declared the patent abandoned, suddenly said that it should be reinstated because he was:
"not an attorney but a pauper disabled living on a fixed income (SSI) who cannot pay $200 to petition your office."This is the real shame here. This myth that all you need is a patent to be a success leads a pauper living on social security to spend thousands of dollars on a patent, which the USPTO gladly soaks up. What a scam. The US government is taking in folks like this guy, convincing him that all he needs to live out his dreams is to get a patent, knowing quite well that a patent by itself is pretty meaningless.
But the guy believes in the dream, as seen from the fact that he sued the USPTO for $1 billion, claiming that was the value of his patent "in the U.S. and world market." So here we have a guy, who is living off of a tiny Social Security check, throwing away thousands of dollars on a patent that he's not doing anything with, believing that it's somehow worth $1 billion. Doesn't that seem highly problematic to people?
