8 REPORT OF THE PATENT COMMITTEE 



Your Committee believes that salaries should be paid to the examiners 

 proportionate to those paid for equally high technical work in other 

 departments created recently; such, for example, as are paid in the Army 

 and Navy and in the office of the Attorney General. The examiners are 

 passing upon questions often involving millions of dollars, and they can- 

 not be at their best in this vitally important work unless their salaries 

 are large enough for them to live comfortably and without strain. The 

 chances of making mistakes in the granting of patents are great enough 

 even under the most favorable circumstances, and they should not be 

 increased by compelling the examiners to work for inadequate salaries. 

 The inducements should be such as to present compensation and a career 

 which would attract and hold men of the highest ability. The payment 

 of adequate salaries and the creation of provisions tending to hold out 

 attractive prospects to the examiners would also tend to raise the dignity 

 of the Patent Office and to increase its standing in the estimation of the 

 public and of Congress and the Courts, and so would tend to enhance 

 the value to the public of the patent system. 



The work of the Patent Office has grown so much more rapidly than 

 has the examining force that the examination to determine whether or 

 not the invention claimed in an application for patent is novel is impera- 

 tively restricted to the field of search where it is most likely that the in- 

 vention will be found. Many patents are granted which would not be 

 granted if the examiner had time to make a thorough search. One of the 

 Assistant-Commissioners of Patents is compelled to devote a large 

 amount of his time to speeding the work of the examiners in order to 

 prevent further falling behind in the number of unexamined cases. Money 

 is often invested on the strength of patents, only to find later that the 

 patent is upset in the courts, because the Patent Office search did not go 

 far enough to discover that the invention had already been disclosed in 

 some earlier patent or publication. The granting of a patent with in- 

 valid claims or claims which are too broad or which are nebulous is a 

 menace to the art to which it relates, and until such a patent has bfeen 

 adjudicated and its effect judicially determined, it tends to prevent 

 manufacturing and commerce in that art. Such a patent may, in this 

 way, cost the public many millions of dollars besides the cost of estab- 

 lishing its invalidity or its true breadth or meaning by litigation, and 

 the prevention of the granting of such patents by any reasonable in- 

 crease in the examining force of the Patent Office would, in many cases, 

 be a very large saving. The inducement to inventors and investors in 

 patents is consequently lessened, the standing of patents before the 



