A War on PTO Deficiencies?: US Patent & Trademark Office Director James E. Rogan today unveiled the PTO’s new restructuring proposal. Entitled “The 21st Century Strategic Plan“, the plan is unintentionally amusing, and enlightening as to the essential difference between private business and government bureaucracies. When was the last time a business was so spectactularly successful at gaining new customers that it referred to it as a “crisis”? Could you imagine Pepsi getting nervous as it started gaining market share?

The government is a different animal. Drivers’ license bureaus, for example, have a Stalinesque ugliness about them, combined with horrible service; they view additional “customers” as a burden. The same is apparently the case with our PTO. In the Strategic Plan, for example, Director Rogan says, “Today, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is under siege. Patent application filings have increased dramatically throughout the world. There are an estimated seven million pending applications in the world’s examination pipeline, and the annual workload growth rate is in the range of 20-30 percent” (emphasis added).

This is not just isolated language. For instance, Rogan says “Europe, Japan and other industrialized nations face this same crisis. […] This 21st Century Strategic Plan sets forth an ambitious agenda to resolve the crisis all intellectual property organizations are facing” (emphasis added). Horrible! Alert the media (uh, welll, he did)–we are UNDER SIEGE, there is an increase in business and customers are knocking down our doors! Crisis! Help!

Jeez, if you don’t want the job, give me a call.