Research On The Impact Of Patent Fees On Patent Quality Based On USPTO Data

Patent fee is the fee charged by the patent offices of various countries in accordance with the respective legal provisions and in the process of providing the applicants or assignees with the examination,protection or other patent-related social services in accordance with the prescribed procedures.It is one of the conditions that a assignee must be complied with in order to protect his technical achievements from infringement.Whether the effective control of patent fees can help the government adjust the structure of patent applications and maintain and improve the patent quality,is one of the hot topics in intellectual property fields in recent years.This paper reveals the constraint relationship between the two by comparing the changes in patent quality before and after the change of patent fees.According to the US 1982 Patent Law Amendment and the US Patent and Trademark Office(USPTO),choose four time points of fees increase and decrease in 1982,2000,2013 and 1999.For comparative analysis,choose cited times,number of backward bites to Non-Patent literature,maintenance months,number of class and PCT application as key indicators for assessing patent quality.Use comparative analysis,non-parametric test and other methods to analyze the patent data,observe the number of patent applications,maintenance,and analyze the effect of patent quality on the change of patent quality under different time limits and different enterprise scale conditionsThe research results show that the patent application fee is increased,the patent quality index is increased by 13.9%,the application fee has a significant effect on the improvement of patent quality;the patent maintenance fee is increased,the patent quality index is increased by 4.2%,indicating that the patent maintenance fee can eliminate more low-quality patents with relatively high quality.In general,the patent application fee has better effect on patent quality than patent maintenance fee.In the evaluation of the effect after the change of patent fees in different time periods,the effect of the two years after the implementation of the policy is generally higher than one year,reflecting the lag of the implementation of the patent policy.In the statistics on the impact of patent fees on different enterprise scales,it is found that the patent application fee is raised,the patent quality index of large enterprises is increased by 14.97%,which is higher than that of small enterprises by 10.57%.The patent maintenance fee is raised,the growth rate of invalid patents of large enterprises is also higher than that of small enterprises by 23.6%,indicating that large enterprises are more affected by changes in patent fees,and assignees' patent applications and maintenance behaviors are more constrained.