Apocalypse Soon: U.S. Patent 100 Million Is Coming

• Author: Christopher White
• Position: Christopher White is a patent agent with Lee & Hayes, PLLC, in Rochester, New York. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the author and not necessarily those of Lee & Hayes, any client thereof, or any other party. This article is for your amusement only.
• Pages: 65-65

Published in Landslide® magazine, Volume 11, Number 1, a publication of the ABA Section of Intellectual Property Law (ABA-IPL), ©2018 by the American Bar Association. Reproduced with permission. All rights reserved.

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Apocalypse Soon

U.S. Patent 100 Million Is Coming

Remember Y2K? The world panicked about computers

treating babies born on 1/1/00 as centenarians. After

all, software that only stored two digits of the year

couldn’t tell 1900 from 2000. Well, U.S. Patent

10,000,000 issued on June 19, and the world hasn’t

ended yet. I guess the U.S. Patent and Trademark

Ofce (USPTO) was prepared for the change from seven-

digit patent numbers to eight-digit numbers. But there’s

another problem coming, and I’d like to be the rst to sound

the alarm. Are you prepared for U.S. Patent 100,000,000?

Why should we think about this now? It took over 189

years1 for the rst 10 million patents to issue, so patent

100 million shouldn’t issue this millennium, right? Well,

a recent USPTO press release mentions the “rapid pace of

change.”2 The pace is denitely picking up, at least for pat-

entable inventions.

The million patents from number one to number one mil-

lion issued over the course of about 75 years. Since 1961,

each successive group of a million patents has taken less time

to complete. Most recently, patents nine million through 10

million issued over the course of only three years. At that

rate, on a power-series trend, U.S. Patent 100,000,000 will

issue on May 3, 2081. You heard it here rst! Get your data-

bases ready now—nine-digit numbers are almost upon us!

But what if—as p eople say—the pace of innovation really

is exponentially increasing?3 An exponential trend would mark

September 5, 2024, in history as the date the USPTO issued U.S.

Patents 43,000,000–100,000,000 on a single day!

Okay, maybe not. But prediction is an inexact science, so

what if that actually happened? The USPTO has had about

8,000 examiners on staff over the last million patents.4 That’s

about a tenth of a patent per examiner per day, spread evenly.

In order to manage September 5, 2024, the USPTO would

need over 530 million examiners on staff—more than 750

times the current population of Washington, D.C.5

U.S. Patent 100,000,000 is coming. I believe we have

enough time to prepare for that ninth digit and prevent the

database apocalypse. But the real lesson for people working

with patents is a simple one: invest in D.C. real estate. n

—Christopher White

Endnotes

1. Disregarding the “X” patents issued from 1790–1836, for

those of you keeping score at home.

2. Press Release, USPTO, United States Issues Patent Num-

ber 10,000,000 (June 19, 2018), https://www.uspto.gov/about-us/

news-updates/united-states-issues-patent-number-10000000.

3. Alison E. Berman & Jason Dorrier, Technology Feels

Like It’s Accelerating—Because It Actually Is, S-

H (Mar. 22, 2016), https://singularityhub.com/2016/03/22/

technology-feels-like-its-accelerating-because-it-actually-is/.

4. Patent Examiners, USPTO, https://www.uspto.gov/corda/dashboards/

patents/kpis/kpiExaminers.kpixml (last visited Aug. 20, 2018).

5. See Dan Malouff, DC’s Population Hits 700,000, G

G W. (Feb. 26, 2018), https://ggwash.org/view/66649/

dcs-population-hits-700000.

Christopher White is a patent agent with Lee & Hayes, PLLC, in Rochester, New York. The opinions expressed here are solely those

of the author and not necessarily those of Lee & Hayes, any client thereof, or any other party. This article is for your amusement only.

“No.100,000,000”“No.100,000,000”

RR