State of the Union 2011 Fact Sheet: Patents

The White House Office of Public Engagement released this patents fact sheet, “President Obama’s Plan to Win the Future by Catalyzing Invention, Innovation and Economic Growth through Patent Reform,” the night of Obama's Jan. 25, 2011, State of the Union address.

According to the fact sheet, American inventors live with an unnecessarily frustrating and costly patent system, where delay is the name of the game and where entrepreneurs must wait on average 34 months as a result of a backlog of 700,000 patent applications (almost double what it was in 2000).

Obama's patent reform program is key to winning the future by allowing inventions to move to the market more quickly and stimulating faster innovation. The program focuses on both quality and timeliness, builds on a bipartisan effort in the last Congress, and addresses the failures that one study found led to “foregone innovation” and a cost of billions of dollars per year to the economy.