A top-flight Patent Attorney remarks on the impact of Bush's political favors game on the United States Patent field:

"..more troubling in this whole scenario is Mr. Dudas himself. He is a young attorney who is not a patent lawyer. He should never have been nominated by President Bush. Mr. Dudas was, at the time of this nomination (and today), totally unqualified for the position of Director of the USPTO. Nevertheless, the Senate ratified his nomination, apparently preferring to fight other Presidential nominees, such as those nominated to serve as federal judges.

Mr. Dudas has instituted a number of ill-conceived policies at the USPTO, equally destructive in nature, and wholly without proper understanding of how industry functions, patent prosecution works, and the role of patents in fueling R & D and the economy. In short, he has wreaked havoc in the USPTO and has failed at the most fundamental level to manage the USPTO by ensuring that an adequate number of patent examiners are hired, properly trained and properly supervised.

What the public ended up with during Mr. Dudas' term as Director is a largely dysfunctional USPTO, continually made worse by bad policies - many probably illegal - and with a clear failure to understand the consequences of his actions.

Anybody can see that if the new rules survive the present Tafas v. Dudas lawsuit, there will be an explosion of appeals, crippling the USPTO's ability to decide patentability on the merits and delaying the grant of a huge number patents many, many years into the future. The new rules will also result in a drastic reduction in applications, and as a consequence, inevitably result in the need for the USPTO to dramatically raise fees on the remaining patent applications and patents since Congress requires the USPTO to be self-supporting from user fees.

As a political appointee of fairly high rank (Under Secretary of Commerce), it is likely that Mr. Dudas will be gone when a new administration takes over in January, 2009, regardless of whether that administration is Democrat or Republican.

At that time, hopefully the new President will nominate one of literally hundreds of qualified patent attorneys to the post of Director of the USPTO. Almost any in-house patent counsel from a Fortune 500 company is far more qualified than Mr. Dudas, and I cannot imagine any of them doing more harm to the US patent system than Mr. Dudas has caused in a very short number of years."

Yet another aspect of ignorance made official in the interest of a low-0caliber ole boy network.


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