Grant rates in the patent office

MARK A. LEMLEY, BHAVEN N. SAMPAT: Is the Patent Office a Rubber Stamp?

"While it grants patents to more than two-thirds of those who apply, the USPTO is not a rubber stamp. It rejects a small but non-trivial percentage of applications (15-20%), and more applications are abandoned for business reasons. …… Further, in a significant number of cases – around 40% of those that issue – the prosecution process requires the applicant to amend the claims, presumably generally to make them narrower.”

“We also find that the likelihood of obtaining a patent varies significantly by industry in surprising ways. For example, patents are much more likely to be granted in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries than in software and computer fields.” “Overall, those industries that are most identified with bad patents (computer software, hardware, and business methods) turn out to be those with the lowest grant rates.”

“Our findings certainly suggest that debates about patent system reform need to move beyond a narrow focus on the grant rate. They also suggest that published patent application data and PAIR transaction/status data are a rich and unexplored source of information for examining the law and economics of the patent system, and firm and industry level patent strategies.”

Notes 1: The grant rate statistics of USPTO is similar to that of SIPO, according to my observation.
2: SIPO lacks a database system like PAIR, which limits its further capacity building.