> Does anybody know why it costs a fee to submit a patent? Wouldn't it be much more fair to small inventors if we could just submit a patent for free, and the moment we'd like to exert that patent in a court, we'd pay for its examination?

No, since the whole point of that patent system is to have these examined, reviewed, and notice publicly provided so that people can do business without having to resort to litigation (sure, with the implicit threat of litigation in the background, but examination and patent grants are supposed to provide a degree of clarity.)

Admittedly, that process doesn't work well in all too many cases, but it would make the system orders of magnitude worse if instead of having an in-advance examination process we just had a series of patent applications hanging around waiting for litigation to start to provide an excuse for them to be examined.

There are big discounts for small inventors. The basic filing and examination fee for a "micro entity" is $250 now. If a patent issues, that adds $240.

> Admittedly, that process doesn't work well in all too many cases, but it would make the system orders of magnitude worse if instead of having an in-advance examination process we just had a series of patent applications hanging around waiting for litigation to start to provide an excuse for them to be examined.

Why exactly? For whom?

> Why exactly?

Because it magnifies the lack of clarity problems in the current poor examination process which both makes litigation between market participants in comparable positions more likely and makes market players with less resources more compelled to knuckle under to those with more because they can't afford the risk of litigation. The greater clarity is provided in advance, the less uncertainty/risk is involved in litigation, which both makes litigation less common and reduces coercion of market participants by those more able to afford risky litigation.

> For whom?

Pretty much everyone, though less for the richest players in the market and the patent lawyers.

The main reason is to fund the office as it's one of the few agencies that is 100% funded by fees (versus appropriations). So much so that Congress often skims money from the fees they collect. The fact that the office is sort of set up like a traditional corp. (i.e., earning revenue, paying salaries, getting "taxed" by Congress) colors a lot of discussion on how the office operates, in my opinion. Also, the percentage of patents that are actually asserted in court is extremely small compared to the number of issued patents.

Because the "patent" in that situation would have no presumption of validity. Nobody would loan you money based on it. You couldn't tell how much protection you had from competitors.

Small entity filing fees aren't too bad.

The actual filing fees for a small/micro entity is pretty low. Most of the money you're spending is in legal fees. And if we deferred examination until the litigation stage, then yes, you'd save some money on actually prosecuting the patent application (arguing with the examiner, etc.)... but you NOT be saving any money on the up-front drafting costs. (Unless you just drafted the thing yourself, which is generally a very bad idea.)

Back of the envelope numbers: you might save 50% of the current costs of obtaining a patent. It'd still be far from free.

Sending email is free. What can be said about signal-to-noise ratio of email? Is there a connection?

The point is, up until the moment the patent is "exerted", the signal does not matter. The process is just a means of recording that the submitter had a certain idea at a certain moment. Which, to me, sounds perfectly legitimate.

With this construct, an inventor could go to e.g. Google, and sell them this idea ("potential patent"). This way, small inventors wouldn't need to have a big pile of cash just to secure their ideas.

This sounds wrong to me.

The idea of the patent is (at leas in part) to protect inventor's investment. When someone spent significant effort researching and prototyping some useful device, it makes sense to pay a small sum for its legal protection from copycats.

If someone just stumbled upon an idea, without any plans to use it for profit and without sunk costs that one would like to protect, why grant a patent? Someone else could (and historically did) invent the same thing independently, and put it to actual use. Why impede the efforts of that latter person?

While we're at, it let me remind the idea of exponential patent fees.

A patent should require e.g. $100 to keep for the first year, $400 for the next year, $1600 for the third year, etc, quadrupling the cost each year. If you're on a gold mine like Singer's needle, or Edison's lamp, or a transistor, you have no trouble paying for that patent for 10 or maybe 20 years. If you patented something useful but minor, you can keep it patented as long as it makes financial sense, and then put it to public domain. If you're a NPE patent troll, you're toast in a really short term.

Not really sure with the current climate what we need is more patents. The one thing the fee does do is pay to have it examined which does act as a filter.

I believe Australia has something similar to what you describe. You file anything you want, but it does not get examined until you want to assert it. If you ever recall reading about a "patent on a wheel", that was the kind of patent it was.