Unlike copyright, a patent is not automatically granted when someone has an interesting idea and writes it down. In most countries, a patent application must be submitted to a government patent office. A patent will only be granted if the invention or process being submitted meets certain conditions:
- It must be original. The invention being submitted must not have been submitted before.
- It must be non-obvious. You cannot patent something that anyone could think of. For example, you could not put a pencil on a chair and try to get a patent for a pencil-holding chair.
- It must be useful. The invention being submitted must serve some purpose or have some use that would be desired.
The job of the patent office is to review patent applications to ensure that the item being submitted meets these requirements. This is not an easy job: in 2012, the US Patent Office received 576,763 patent applications and granted 276,788 patents. The current backlog for a patent approval is 18.1 months. Over the past fifty years, the number of patent applications has risen from just 100,000 a year to almost 600,000; digital technologies are driving much of this innovation.
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