More people talk innovation than walk it, making it hard to evaluate claims that new ways of doing things are on the rise. One way to quantify technological innovation is to look at the growth of patented inventions. In 1999, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued 153,588 utility patents; more than tripling the number issued twenty years earlier (48,839 patents in 1979). Patents for electrical inventions (which includes computing hardware and software) increased from 8,168 (16% of the total) in 1979 to 54,849 (35%) in 1999, growing almost twice as fast (1.85) as patents in general.
It would seem that innovation is on a roll, especially in the high-tech sector. This assumes, however, that the USPTO has been doing its homework and only grants patents to inventions that are truly novel, non-obvious, and useful. According to patent system analyst Gregory Aharonian,
"... given the low amounts of non-patent prior art cited (and missed prior patents) as a percentage of all available non-patent prior art, and the decreasing time spent per claim, it is not unreasonable to conclude that patent quality is dropping as the PTO is overwhelmed with patent applications."
Aharonian's statistics, compiled from USPTO data, support this conclusion. By almost any measure (such as claims per patent, time spent examining each claim, and prior art considered) USPTO hasn't been upholding its constitutional responsibilities. Rather than evaluating patents and deciding their merits, hard-pressed examiners are snookered by well-practiced corporate patent attorneys and a "customer-centered" USPTO management into awarding one specious claim after another. This amounts to a basic patent registration procedure -- a bureaucratized, contorted analog of filing for copyright -- that leaves the validity of patents to be sorted out by costly and protracted civil suits down the road, and jacks up the costs of products produced under license.
The intellectual property protection tail is wagging the innovation dog. Corporations (to which 86% of all U.S. patents were assigned in 1999) know they can easily obtain patents, and this encourages them to treat patent protection as just one more business strategy to prop up revenues and prevail in the marketplace. It doesn't matter whether an invention is significant, new, or the company actually discovered it. What's important is getting a government-protected monopoly on some process or widget: pseudo-innovation as a pre-emptive means to a profitable end.
As computing spews into one sphere of life, one industry, one household after another, the value of software and information relative to tangible stuff rises. Once it's installed somewhere, digital technology doesn't sit still. Version 2.1 of whatever fixes annoying problems and is easier to use; new generations of mobile networks beggar older ones and require new handsets to use; MP3 music players become obsolete as sound files come wrapped in security blankets; smart cards know how much credit you have. To some extent, such innovations represent an evolution of design and capability, but many are deployed to churn saturated markets, to prompt consumers to upgrade and move on. Vendors work the patent game assiduously to ensure that their products contain as much proprietary and licensable content as possible. For many firms, the goal of innovation isn't creating cool stuff but amassing and trading intellectual property rights.
Ever-widening patent and trademark protections are being sought and granted for software, digital media, and business practices as corporations strive to tether everything that could possibly move out of their orbits. This could lead to a sinister new spin on innovation. Quite soon we may very well see companies such as Microsoft start to assert rights of ownership to documents produced with the aid of their software agents and accessories, first to the extent that a document's content is composed automatically, later extending to a share of all works produced, as soon as it becomes possible to accurately meter, report and charge for such activities. For example, if a person composes a poem with online aids such as rhyming dictionaries, thesauri, modal advisors, and meter-correcting agents, software vendors will argue (probably successfully) that ownership of the poem must be shared with the holders of patents and copyrights for the technology involved in its creative production.
Copyright © 2001 by Geoffrey Dutton. All rights reserved.