Intellectual property – a popular term for ideas processed by a system nearly as old as America – remains in limbo. The IP term covers copyrights, trademarks and patents.

Almost since the first U.S. patent law was introduced in 1790, American inventors and their competitors throughout the world have insisted the U.S. patent system needs fixing. Because of its complexity, Guglielmo Marconi’s claim to inventing radio (wireless) telegraphy and Alexander Graham Bell’s rights to the telephone are still in dispute. Not to worry: U.S. “patent reform” is on the way.

Cooler heads – patent attorneys such as Doug Sorocco, director and shareholder of the Oklahoma City law firm Dunlap Codding – fall in the middle of the debate.

“I tend to favor more pragmatic reforms over sweeping, ‘Let’s throw the whole thing out and start over’ approach,” Sorocco says. “So I support propositions that make patenting work better, provide more intuitive and/or predictable results, and decrease the costs of participating in the system.”

‘Look around the world’
At the same time, Sorocco sees faults in how the patent system is administered.

“I also believe the entire U.S. Patent Office needs to be overhauled,” he says. “As a whole, I’d say we need to look around the world and see what’s working in other systems: Japan, Europe, Canada, Australia ... and see what lessons we can learn.”

Patent applications cost anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 to research, write and file. Much of Dunlap Codding’s work involves originating patents, not just litigating them.

“Probably 95% of all patent lawsuits get settled out of court,” Sorocco says.

The perpetual outcry for patent reform became a plank in President Obama’s platform. Obama has called for an overhaul of the U.S. Patent Trademark Office, a creaking bureaucracy so slow and inefficient as to have accumulated a backlog of 700,000 patent applications — a logjam expected to mount, as more than half a million U.S. patent applications are filed each year. But the devil is in the details.

According to news accounts, Obama wants to subject some patent applications to “peer review,” a process he says will result in “gold-plated” status for the patents thought to be most important. Obama also supports critics’ claims that the patent system too often results in “wasteful litigation.”

The real issue?
The stars could already be aligned on this question and more pressing issues, suggests Bill Grider, a writer for The Nation. Obama has promised to appoint commissions to study not just the patent reform issue, but also Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, Grider says.

“As with other commissions, the real issue most likely will not be the recommendations themselves, but who will be appointed to these discussion groups,” he says.

During his election campaign last year, Obama said an extra layer of approval will speed the more important patent applications through the system. His concern involves mostly patents involving high-speed communication systems still absent from vast rural swaths of the country.

Sorocco calls the “gold-plated” concept for advancing certain select patents “an abomination,” and says, “The U.S. Constitution provides for the creation of a patenting system. If the government is to grant a monopoly through the issuance of a patent, each should be subject to the same rigorous and exhaustive examination.”

The country’s large software makers – the principal companies pressing for patent reform – are being challenged by a host of other companies that manufacture hard goods, and by labor unions.

Ironclad patents tough
Chris Corbett, a patent agent with Dunlap Codding, concentrates on front-end patent work. He says the big problem with the patent process will remain, despite what “reforms” occur. While his firm represents large biotech, biomedical, pharmaceutical and chemical concerns, it also handles patent work for scores of individual inventors.

“Getting a patented product made and sold is difficult. You don’t want to get too far away from what the patent says,” Corbett says. In the ideal world, “You think of all the possible variations of an invention and incorporate them so somebody else won’t come along and copy it. Our job is to write the patent application so someone else can’t get around it.”

He says one of his primary duties is to “ferret out variations of how an invention may be designed.” The main problem here is a human one, he says. “We have to educate inventors about what they need in a patent application. Sometimes, inventors just can’t give us the information they need for a good patent.”

Basically, a patent is a government guarantee for a product monopoly, good for 20 years or so. But there are strings attached: “When you write the patent application, you can’t just go back and add to it,” Corbett says. “You can re-file a patent, but then you lose the original date of invention.”

Patent extensions past the 20-year limit are extremely rare, he says.

“Basically, that takes an Act of Congress,” he says. “The big pharma companies are mostly the ones with enough resources to get that done.”