1. Large companies pay a bonus for every patent applied and bigger one for approval.

2. Patent lawyers are paid for filed patents.

3. Patent office makes money on each patent. They view the review process as a cost center and optimize it for fast approval.

Not just "incentivized to ignore quality", they aren't duty-bound to consider quality at all. The PTO evaluates applications for novelty, not quality.

The three main relevant parts of the US Code are:

35 USC Sec. 101: is it patentable? (i.e., it must be a process, machine, process, or manufactured good. It can't be something like an idea or song)

35 USC Sec. 102: is it novel? (i.e., no one single prior existing item teaches all the limitations of the patent claims)

35 USC Sec. 103: is it non-obvious? (i.e., you can't combine a couple of different patents to arrive at your patent)

There's a few other important sections (like 112 that ensures you're giving enough detail), but none of them look at "quality". In other words, you can patent a worthless invention as long as it passes those wickets.

Edit: Somewhat surprisingly to some, they don't necessarily evaluate infringement either. So you could, in theory, have a novel patent that you can't use to make something because it infringes on an existing patent.

As it should be.

The USPTO is in no place to evaluate a patent's quality, unless youre a USPTO clerk whos first name starts with Albert and your last name ends in -Stein.

---

But in seriousness, novelty is the important factor in a patent, not quality. As utility patents/improvement patents are a thing.

The clerks are expected to do a certain amount of work per week and granting a patent counts as more work than denying a patent.

So; clerk are incentivized to grant a patent as it takes less effort and yields more production units. If a patent is of poor quality and later is invalidated in a lawsuit; the clerk will not lose production units. Therefore; the clerk is incentivized to grant patents as they count as more production units and not penalized for granting a patent they shouldn't've.

https://www.uspto.gov/sites/default/files/Examination%20Time...

In fact, the most production units that can be obtained by a patent examiner for any particular patent is to issue a final rejection, get the patentee to ask for re-examination, reject again, and then have the patentee abandon the patent.

Edit: so at some point in the patent portfolio cross-licensing negotiation, there's a pure numbers game, so for large corporations there is some value in patents nobody is ever going to implement.

At least that's my recollection from 15 years ago about why Google paid me as sole inventor of a patent. (I was working on indexing, and thought "Oh no, if someone does X, then indexing becomes incredibly harder, basically DRM for the web. Webspam could hide more easily. Oh, but if we patent X, that might make my life easier in the future." The patent lawyer zeroed in too much on my mention of CAPTCHA as a possible use case, so I'm not sure if Google could really use my patent to prevent its use as DRM/Webspam hiding. At some point, I decided pushing back against the lawyer to make the patent more broadly applicable might not be good for society. I didn't feel strongly enough to turn down my patent bonus, just strongly enough to stop pushing edits back to the lawyer.)

The patent lawyer is just there to file the patent and help their client get past the approval process.

It is the PATENT OFFICE who's job it is to judge quality.

Have several patents, btw.

Hasn't it always been the case? There's a ton of old patents for shit which can't work as described.

When at lockheed we had what I referred to as the "Croatian Coalition" a bunch of Croatian engineers that were all over all the patents we were filing (RFID for weapons) -- they were all so proud of all their patents (as they should be) - but they were really aggressive on filing for not just the satisfaction (getting a patent must be a great feeling, I am not yet personally on any even though I have influenced several)

But they like the bonuses and internal recognition that came with them.

Also, spamming the patent office would be hard unless you have deep pockets/are a patent attorney or have Big Corp funding your efforts (and rewarding them)

I am sure there are cheap ways to file, but for the average person, not so much.

"Having N patents" should be something that gets frowned on, not something you highlight on your resume. When asked about this myself (during interviews or whatever), I proudly boast that I have zero patents to my name and that I actively avoid being part of the problem by participating. I see it as an opportunity to 1. help steer our culture in whatever tiny way I can and 2. get up on a little soap box about the problem.

In the past, I've been asked to help out with patent applications for these so-called "inventions" that I developed, and I always tell my manager "If you want to patent this, I can't stop you, but do not put my name on it or associate it with me in any way."

If you invented it, then they have to put your name on the application as the inventor. There’s also a declaration that the inventor is supposed to sign as part of the application. If the inventor is dead or otherwise unavailable (e.g., refuses to sign), there’s an alternative form that can be filed.

The inventive step is the actual decision of 'we will do this thing in this way', or rather determining the 'method'. In fact, the guidelines we follow are that someone implementing the design based on some instructions, i.e, just working on a ticket, is explicitly not to be included as an inventor - unless they actually decided that's how it should be done.

Of course, it's nice to work in a place whereby you get to design and implement the system and become an inventor. In my opinion and experience at least. But I can see some organisations whereby developers are popping off tickets in sprints and implementing them - but that is by definition not an inventive step.

EDIT: I won't pollute the thread with thank yous for replies, but they are appreciated.

(thoughts and opinions always my own)

https://www.canada.ca/en/immigration-refugees-citizenship/se...

EDIT: just checked and it’s obsolete. Not sure if there is a post-Brexit equivalent. https://www.gov.uk/tier-1-investor

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/05/17/key-facts...

https://www.forbes.com/sites/stuartanderson/2020/08/06/h-1b-...

The second link you posted lists a large number of anti-immigrant ideas that Trump had. That was the general tenor of his administration as I personally experienced it: rhetoric about unauthorized immigration, actions against legal immigrants.

(I used to be on an H1B and got my green card last year.)

On the other side of the aisle, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) called Trump’s offering a “dead-on-arrival plan that is not a remotely serious proposal.” And Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) slammed it as a “despicable abdication of moral authority” that would have kept Blumenthal’s own immigrant father from entering the United States.

…

Democrats on Thursday also took issue with the White House’s characterization of the kind of immigrants who bring “merit” to the United States.

“It is really a condescending word,” Pelosi said at her weekly news conference on Thursday morning. “Are they saying family is without merit?”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAISE_Act#Full_details_of_the_...

The goal of the RAISE Act was to substantially reduce family-based immigration while not increasing employment-based immigration to compensate for that.

I didn't realize Trump had his own plan (that was never going to be law anyway). But based on what I actually personally experienced Trump actually do, my Bayesian prior for it being helpful to immigrants is extraordinarily low.

Canada also has a major housing crisis due to not building enough housing for population growth (which is entirely immigration, Canada's population would shrink without it).

Doesn't seem their system works very well in practice. At least the U.S. employer based green card system mostly guarantees that employment green card recipients already have jobs.

I am not sure if this logic is accurate. There can be housing shortage if people move to certain part of the country internally too. USA has 'housing crisis' but houses are plenty and cheap in peoria IL.

- Racial bias

- Sexual bias

- Age bias

- Candidate's English / French ability.

- Candidate's actual experience isn't relevant enough.

- Candidate's personality.

- Candidate's appearance.

- Candidate's communication skills.

Why would I give you the real reason when I can provide a generic reason and stay out of trouble?

Some people I know went to college to get local credentials. Luckily community college is affordable and respected. Others changed fields. Others started their first business. A few left the country.

Canadian here. Nope.

But FAANG stuff? No, these are the companies that just had layoffs.

And we can see exactly how this has played out in Canada. Too many upper class professionals gouging each other's eyes out for $1M starter homes, and not enough people with real physical skills, like building them.

Well, tradesmen build houses, schools, and hospitals people and a growing society need. There's only so much demand and value for society that (non-SV) programmers add. You could survive in a world with only tradesmen and farmers, but not so much with only JS coders.

Programmers are valued in places like the US because US is the home to big-tech, an industry generating trillions in revenue for the US, but the US is the global outlier here. In other places of the world that don't have big-tech, programmers have much less value to society.

South Park also did an episode on this.

Housing crisis is because of unsustainably high immigration levels.

In 2023 alone, there was a net inflow of over 1.3 million people. It's a lot for a country of 39 million. Where will they live?

Another major issue is the suppression of wages this causes.

Also there is a serious lack of diversity in the immigrant population (no cap by country as in the US). This is tearing apart the cultural fabric of communities.

As someone who had someone come over on a O-1 visa, I 100% would have been willing to pay double for that person specifically.

It also removes the common issue of people who are hiring people below market rate or are trying to push salaries down for certain industries. It makes companies really make sure they actually need that technical expert from overseas.

Then open it up to everyone else if there are quotas.

If an employee is recruited at $250k, they clearly have skills the market values.

The point would be that we fill and address the talent problem longer term. AKA if you need to hire foreign workers, you have to invest in developing new talent.

I would say that total comp should be taken into account, but we should take a more strategic approach to addressing workforce gaps rather than just relying on importing talent.

My proposal for green cards:

zero-sum - points based system based on your current salary, taxes paid and the occupation shortage list OR straight up auction

non-zero-sum - let people apply for a green card as long as they've stayed in the country for X years without any criminal infractions, have earned above N*min-wage for all those years.

If you're asking about work visas, probably just ranking by location-adjusted-salary and handing them out should do the job.

The problem is they don't update it constantly like Canada does. Needs funding I guess.

https://www.uscis.gov/policy-manual/volume-6-part-e-chapter-...

Those wouldn't be perfect metrics, and they might be easy to fudge. So it then becomes a question of if disqualification of the capable is worse than qualification of the incapable.

I personally prefer to let more people in than less. It's not like it's smooth sailing in the US if you can't do skilled work.

IIRC 3 years of work experience are considered equivalent to 1 year of college education, which allows those who didn't get a degree but have extensive experience to also have an avenue for obtaining a Visa.

Simple and objective.

Make it 250k for 3 consecutive years and forget about school.

I know plenty of people in this boat from India who wait 15 years to get a GC because of our idiotic process.

If I were to propose something different, it would be ratios by job title/salary, with obvious veto ability by government TLA agencies for security risks. Points systems for skilled migration are an in exact proxy and miss out on talented people with less formal educations. I’d rather place the burden of deciding who gets to work here on businesses who are trying to fill actual positions. Let them decide who is actually qualified based on the actual skills they’re looking for. And because they have to hire a requisite number of similar-level Americans, the worst thing that might happen is a sort of jobs program for Americans when companies are forced to employ more Americans to satisfy the ratio needed to hire foreigners.

This would have two other benefits that I can see. First, it would make it much easier for small companies with primarily-American workforces to hire foreigners since they wouldn’t need so much legal help or luck in winning a visa lottery. Second, foreign workers would integrate better because they’d always be working with Americans.

The main weakness that would need to be protected against is companies under-classifying and underpaying foreign workers (i.e. the janitors are American but are up-classified as software engineers and the software engineers are foreign and paid janitorial wages), but I feel these sorts of situations should be addressed by judges when complaints are made against companies trying to game the system.

I think you can derive generic and robust definitions of “exceptional” like this too; eg anyone that is getting paid $1m/yr is clearly exceptional. This is robust to Goodhearting because again, net contributor to the wealth of the country. (1m is an arbitrary number for discussion, obviously you can tune it to get the count you are looking for.)

Trouble is, “exceptional at art” is fundamentally subjective and won’t show up in salary. Similar salary concerns with “exceptionally talented PhD”. I think you need per-industry considerations here. Top N most-cited AI researchers should get a pre-filled green card sent to them.

Personally think we should be allowing any PhD or med school graduate from top institutions to stay indefinitely; so many talented researchers come to the US to study and then get kicked out. We want to keep these people.

There's another reason too:

Having a large number of patents for a given subject matter makes it a veritable arsenal for use against other companies, either offensively or defensively (since a common defense to a lawsuit of patent infringement is a countersuit with your own parent infringement lawsuit). Gotta feed the dancing gorilla

So now you go look at your typical STEM department at a good US university. As you go into masters and Phds, the percentage of foreign students goes up. This isn't because most international students love academia: It's because the immigration system, as described earlier, just makes the piece of paper they hand you so much more valuable that it'd be for someone that is already a US citizen. And since it's especially valuable for students from visa-capped countries, guess what? Students from those countries are disproportionally going through that route.

If we cut the visa limits, and said that a STEM degree and some STEM employment after was a guarantee for a green card in 2 years, I'd expect the number of international students that pick that route to plummet. The disparity between the demand for green cards and the visa limit is so wide, every year the incentive to study longer just increases.

If none of those numbers change, I'd expect that the patent route will just be pushed further. So just like the visa caps are a subsidy for post graduate degrees, this rule clarification will be an implicit subsidy for patent attorneys. Then we'll have yet another set of people with a lot to lose if we raise the visa limits, or stop the per-country quotas.

Nonsense. I've been at a typical STEM department at a top us institution for a decade and interacted with thousands of students. I can count the number of students who were in it for a visa. You don't do a 5-6 year PhD simply for a green card. There are easier ways.

Such as?..

If you're from a capped country, your options are limited. For EB-2/EB-3 the wait time for Indian nationals is around 12 years.

How many do you have? Patents are more difficult to obtain than HN gives credit and they cost a non-inconsequential amount of money too.

That seems like an odd retort to me. Like I have zero because I find the whole idea ethically dubious. When I was at IBM, they had occasional patent brainstorming meetings. I remember saying to one of the more senior engineers that everything I worked on was straightforward/obvious, and he told me I'd be surprised, which didn't do much to sway my thoughts on the ethics there.

Everyone who had been there for a few years had a couple patents. I don't remember any of them now, which I guess is sort of the point: it was all basic stuff that would be very difficult to honestly characterize as an "invention".

From your comments, it seems like you have little exposure to the actual time and effort spent in the patent process. And that is okay!

It would be like me saying "designing your own operating system is easy" and having someone respond "how many OSes have you designed?"

And by the way, your own story bears out the same: despite working for IBM (a company where attorneys familiar with the patent process are no doubt legion), participating or being aware of these patent brainstorm sessions, and stating that everyone had one after a couple years, you have zero. So what would you know about the patent prosecution process? Certainly not enough to say that it's easy.

Evidently, based on patents being issued, it is easy to get a patent in the sense that you don't need a novel or nontrivial invention to do so. You don't need to go through the process to observe the results.

Perhaps there is a lot of paperwork, and in that sense it's not "easy". Or perhaps it is not "easy" to convince the patent office to accept trivial patents or patents on nonpatentable subject matter like math, but the volume of these things suggests that it can't be that hard.

If you knew millions of high school students write an OS as a project each year, you could safely conclude it's not that hard, even if you haven't done it.

So the hard part is having enough money to pay a lawyer. And being morally opposed to patents, especially software patents, is a valid position.

Step 1 - Come up with a software idea and give it to a lawyer

Step 2 - ???

Step 3 - Patent

There was nothing hostile in my reply. I just laid out the exact facts that GP put in their post in order to support the opposite conclusion that GP was pushing.

Source: I've done it just to see what the system is like.

Not much really. The reason being it is already happening as incredibly common thing for last few decades or maybe even longer.

I have seen many fine researchers at workplace like you mentioned above.

They're acquired either by huge companies for a defensive portfolio or by retired old men who get scammed by bottom feeding lawyers willing to file anything for their fee.