Robert Budens has worked for the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) for 19 years. As an examiner in the field of immunology, he has scrutinized more than 1,000 patent applications, ranging from HIV vaccines to antibody therapies. For each patent, he has roughly 20 hours to read the application, search through databases to check if someone else has come up with the idea before, and write a 20-page report on his findings. It's like being back in school, he says from the patent office's gleaming headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, "except that nearly every day I have to write a term paper from scratch". One year, he says, he worked for six months without a day off so that he could keep up with his workload. The USPTO stands at the centre of a patent system in crisis. Examiners labour under a quota system that was developed in 1976, during a simpler technological era. Today, these quotas force examiners to race through applications in a system that, critics say, grants all too many obvious or overlapping patents.
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