Posts Tagged: "patent error"

Since 2020, Patent Errors Have Decreased by 11.24%

In an ideal world, issued patents would not contain errors. In reality, patent drafting is tedious and time-consuming work and perfection is not an attainable goal. The patent industry seems to be steadily getting better, though. In a recent study, we uncovered an 11.24% decrease in errors per patent over the past four years. We observed this decrease by reviewing every patent issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) since 2020 – nearly 1.4 million patents.

Errors in Issued Patents as a Measure of Patent Quality

Companies spend considerable sums of money to develop patent portfolios that protect their valuable innovations. Given the large stakes, it behooves companies to obtain high quality patents. I’ll start this article with an example of a patent mistake that resulted in a bad outcome for the patent owner. iRobot lost a patent infringement claim against a competitor that perhaps could have been avoided. The issue was that important concepts of the claims were not described in the patent, and the meaning of the claims was not clear. The independent claims included the phrase “instructions configured to cause a processor” but the only use of “instructions” in the patent related to operational instructions for a user. Because the patent did not sufficiently describe the “instructions” in the claims, iRobot did not obtain its desired claim construction, and the Federal Circuit found no infringement. It seems plausible that better claim drafting might have avoided these errors and achieved a better outcome for iRobot.