Patent Inflation

Patents are all about quantity, hardly about quality. Your patents are most valuable if you have so many that no one else can keep track of them.

It's a common misbelief that patents are granted for ingenious inventions. Even the patent establishment admits that patents no longer protect huge breakthroughs. It's the little steps that get patented these days. For instance, Siemens alone holds about 50,000 patents. There is no way that those are all brilliant inventions.

Patent inflation is a global problem. On a worldwide basis, 4 million patents are valid as we speak, and every year about 700,000 new patents are applied for. The situation in Europe is no exception.

In more than half of those cases, a patent is actually issued. Software patents is one of the biggest growth areas of all.

The more patents, the more problems. The rising numbers of patent grants and patent applications would be good news if this really meant more innovation. To the contrary, those numbers show ever lower standards by the European Patent Office. Unfortunately, each of those numerous patents is a gun, and many of those guns are in the hands of people and companies who have nothing good in mind.

Click to read why patents are reminiscent of the Cold War