The Patent and Trademark Office USPTO

The Constitution gives Congress the power to promote the progress of science and useful arts by securing to inventors the exclusive right to their discoveries for limited times. The Patent Act of 1790 put that clause to work, and the first patent, for a method of making potash, was signed by George Washington himself. For its first years a board of three cabinet officers, including Thomas Jefferson, examined every application. A separate Patent Office was created in 1802 and spent most of the nineteenth century in the State and then Interior departments before moving to Commerce in 1925.

A patent gives its owner the right to exclude others from making, using, or selling an invention for twenty years from filing, in exchange for publishing how it works. The office receives more than 600,000 patent applications a year and employs roughly 9,000 examiners, each a specialist in a technical field, to judge whether a claimed invention is new, useful, and not obvious. The wait from filing to decision averages about two years. Trademarks, which protect names, logos, and other brand identifiers, are examined separately and can be renewed indefinitely as long as they remain in use. The office has issued more than twelve million patents since 1836, when numbering began.

The USPTO is unusual in paying for itself. Its budget of about four billion dollars comes entirely from the fees applicants pay, and Congress, which must still appropriate the money, has at times diverted the surplus to other purposes. About 13,000 employees work at the headquarters campus in Alexandria, Virginia, and at regional offices, with most examiners now working remotely. The Director, who is also Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property, is confirmed by the Senate and advises the President on patent policy, including the international agreements that harmonize patent rules across countries.

Patent policy divides industries. Pharmaceutical and biotech companies depend on strong patents to recover research costs and lobby for longer, broader protection. Technology companies, which face thousands of overlapping patents on a single product, have pushed for easier challenges, and the 2011 America Invents Act created an administrative board to review granted patents without going to court. Critics on both sides argue over patent trolls, drug prices, and whether software and genes should be patentable at all. The office must examine every application regardless of how those fights come out.