Data from the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office shows that patent applications steered into a secretive program are rejected twice as often as all patent applications, and those eventually issued take years longer to win approval than the overall pool of patent applications.
Under the PTO’s Sensitive Application Warning System (SAWS) program, which has existed for decades but only became public in December, certain patent applications are flagged for the SAWS program and are then subject to further review by up to nine additional people. The patent applicant is never told of the SAWS designation, and because of an overall lack of transparency, it is unclear why some are flagged and others not.
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