How does one judge what is the rate of invention? A lot of inventions came out during Victorian times, so many in fact the US patent office was doing a very brisk business, so many patents were applied for the head of the US patent office suggested he close the patent office at one point, because everything that could be invented was already invented. Patent applications were pretty steady for 40 years from 1963 to 1987. It is safe to say through these years they stayed within a range between 60,000 to a little over 72,000 per year, then something strange happened, they began to slowly pick up steam. With just a couple of exceptions every year until today they kept increasing. They did this dramatically in later years and in 2015 increased to 288,335. This was only US patents and foreign patents increased to 301,075. As you can see the United States is applying for almost as many patents as the rest of the world combined. Why is it patent applications have increased so much?

One of the questions about patents pertains to those patents the United States deems too dangerous to issue and then considers the product either for military use or to have it shelved. This is one area I am not sure about when it comes to statistics. I don’t believe these are counted as patent applications, because I think they are just made to disappear, but I could be in error. There are a lot more of these than we suspect, because even patents for products which seem harmless may have another use. We are living in a very complex world and often inventing things leads to other discoveries which also need to be patented. This has fueled the world of patent applications. We have certain treaties with other countries which have agreed to abide by the patent system and yet there are those countries which have no problem violating patents. China is one of the biggest violators and anyone who has walked down the streets of New York City has seen people selling design dresses and handbags for ridiculously low prices. This is because these items are copies also known as knockoffs.

As bad as this is, if one looks at China’s aviation industry it is easy to see many of the newer planes it has in its Air Force seem to be copies of planes we have designed and are in our own Air Force. When it comes to military hardware some countries have found it a lot cheaper to let somebody else develop it and then use spies to steal the secrets. This is how the Soviet Union learned how to make a nuclear bomb and build an efficient bomber. The Chinese have been stealing our secrets for years including infiltrating NASA and stealing advanced spacecraft secrets. One of the top scientists in NASA disappeared and was found in China. He had everyone fooled, because he had been in the field for over 20 years and was never suspected of being a spy. NASA was so confident in his ability and trustworthiness they put him in one of the top development positions. I don’t know whether he started out to be a spy, or perhaps his family was still in China and being threatened if he didn’t deliver certain secrets back to the Chinese government. This is always the problem when one has family ties in countries which are regarded as unfriendly by the United States.

It has been said not all weapons have been patented. I guess this makes sense, because the patents are probably monitored by the whole world and we wouldn’t want unfriendly nations stealing our inventions, especially those which had military applications. When companies are purchased the patents they filed usually go to the new owners. When the United States was the leader in television and electronics these companies owned all the patents, but eventually the companies were all sold and these precious patents went to places like Japan, China, Korea and others. Once they had these patents they could go about cutting us out of the loop. From that point on it was downhill for the United States electronic industry. We have never recovered from this sell off. It wasn’t only electronics where we lost out, the same thing happened to our steel industry. Then we began to lose out in many other areas and you can see the results today, all that cheap and sometimes shoddy merchandise for sale in dollar stores. You would think we would’ve learned our lesson, but no, many US companies decided to have some of their products built or put together in foreign countries. The result of this was letting the technology we had be seen by future competitors.

Copyrights are used for intellectual property. Intellectual property (IP) refers to creations of the intellect for which a monopoly is assigned to designated owners by law. A copyright is used to protect games, movies, music, books and many other things. This form of protection is also violated routinely and again if we walked down the streets of New York City we will find many copies of movies which are being sold far below market value. These movies were not supposed to be copied, because they had copyright protection. It isn’t only the Chinese who violate these copyrights, but also US citizens. There is no better example than buying one of these movies, placing it in your DVD player and noticing it was filmed in a movie theater. The tip usually is its poor quality and from time to time people ahead of the camera stand up.

It seems there is a lot of cheating going on when it comes to copyrights and patents and it is time we try to get everyone to respect them. They seem to have been respected at one time, but in modern times there are so many copies of things it’s hard to stop the illegal traffic. Even the copyright process has gotten ridiculous with companies trying to copyright things in computer code which have been used for 40 years. If you ever looked at the show Storage Wars on television you would notice a bidder named Dave Hester who bids by saying “YUUUP!” He has actually copyrighted this word. One rock band musician named Harry Farrell copyrighted the word “lollapalooza”. He was able to do this even though the word has been around for over 100 years. The NFL copyrighted the phrase  ”Super Bowl”. Don’t get caught using it.

Sometimes things can get really silly and you would think the copyright office and even the patent office would use some intelligence in granting patents and copyrights, especially on things like words and phrases which have been in common use. Maybe this is one of the problems with our society, we no longer seem to use our brains in situations like this and acquiesce to a sort of first-come first-served no matter what.