Re: WTF
Reagan had little to do with it. I was there. At the time the USPTO was so many years behind that entire product lifecycles were going by before the original patent got reviewed. (Also, no software patents, as software was based on algorithms and algorithms were math, and math could not be invented, only discovered as a fact of life. Until 1986. But that's another story.) So everybody - Congress, the President, business, etc. were whining out loud about the situation.
My company actually was working with another company to bid on the PTO's RFP for a system to scan and OCR all the existing patents and put them into a searchable online system. This would allow examiners and others to search existing patents more quickly. We ended up not bidding because of some rules for the bid, notably we could be awarded the bid, spend a couple of million on implementation, then the gov could cancel the contract and pay nothing. That was too much risk.
So the decision was made to change the rules, and allow the USPTO to default to 'award' unless they found pretty much obviously prior art in the patent office itself (not outside), and leave it to the patent applicant to defend the patent. This was widely hailed as a big step forward at the time, as it would (and actually did) cut the backlog from six to 10 years down to a year or two. But this was before software patents, widespread gaming via trivial patents and the art of patent trolling. Trivial patents have always been with us, but had not been such a serious problem, and patent trolls didn't really exist yet - a lot of this was the unintended consequence of the new rules _combined with_ the explosion of computers, making it easy both to generate new patents and search for potential victims. It's taken a while, but IMHO we are finally tweaking the new system in ways that are bringing the system back into sanity.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
