Through most of the young history of software engineering, the state of the art has been carried around in the heads of young programmers working late nights in offices strewn with soda cans and pizza boxes, not in academic journals suitable for indexing and perusal by patent examiners. Examiners give most weight to their own database, anyway, treating the 6 million existing U.S. patents as a sort of filing cabinet of all human knowledge. Eighty percent of software patents effectively cite nothing from the computing literature. To me it's a kind of contempt. He contends that the patent office has neither the time nor the expertise needed to distinguish good patents from bad.
Officials measure their own performance in terms of their output.
It's as if they were a manufacturing company turning out product. In 1991, the patent office was cut off from general tax revenues and required to subsist entirely on fees for its operating budget. The political argument was that customers should pay for government services. Examiners know that their year-end bonuses depend on productivity. It's virtually forgotten that the government's customers also include the rest of the nation, the citizenry at large, whose fortunes depend on the agency's judgments and policies.