The UK Intellectual Property Office have announced a public consultation on a new ‘superfast’ patent service. Under the proposed system, a patent could be granted as quickly as 90 days from filing, as long as the applicant is prepared to stomach an additional fee of around £3500 – £4000.
According to the IPO, the £3.5-4k fee “reflects the significant costs of conducting the patent application process in such a short timescale.” But even the lower end of that price range represents over fifteen times the IPO’s current fees for processing an application.
Treating patent applications more urgently for applicants who can afford to pay significant extra fees is unlikely to be a popular move with cash-strapped small businesses. One of the most important jobs of the patent system is to protect small inventors from larger competitors who would steal their ideas. Patents level the playing field by providing an inventor with a legal right to stop others from using an invention, regardless of how much more quickly and cheaply those others might be able to churn out copies. A system where the IPO treats rich applicants more favourably than poor ones is hardly in keeping with that aim.
The ‘superfast’ accelerated procedure would also reduce the period in which interested third parties may file observations on pending patent applications. At present, applications must be published and open for public comment for at least three months before grant. This gives the man in the street the chance to point out that a supposed ‘invention’ has actually been around for years, and to provide evidence of that. Although the system is little-known and therefore little-used, the IPO recently concluded a successful experiment, finding that with a decent online system and a bit of publicity, the public will in fact say something useful about pending patent applications. Reducing the opportunity for this to happen would again seem to be a backward step, allowing big businesses with deep pockets to speed patent applications past public scrutiny.
Getting a British patent granted typically takes three to four years, but various options are already available to accelerate the procedure. The current accelerated procedures are free-of-charge, and can bring the time between application and grant down to around nine months.
Though the UK IPO’s press release refers to the “new” proposals, a paid-for accelerated service was proposed back in 2007. A public consultation at the time attracted all of seventeen responses, most of which were in favour of leaving the system exactly as it was. Even those who supported the idea in principle thought that an extra fee of £400 – £600 was too high in 2007, so it seems somewhat unlikely that five to ten times that fee will find much favour in 2013.