There has been a constant drumbeat of propaganda suggesting that the U.S. is issuing low quality patents.  The academic papers supporting this propaganda compare the issue rates of patents that were filed in the U.S. and in the EPO (European Patent Office) or JPO (Japanese patent office).  While a number of papers have pointed out  the methodolical problems with  these academic papers (see Patent Quality Myth ), the bigger question is whether they selected the correct metric in the first place.  This post suggests that other metrics are more appropriate measures of patent quality and do not suffer from imposing other countries’ goals on the U.S. patent system.  These metrics show that U.S. patent quality has been steadily increasing for over a fifty years and shows that perhaps the U.S. system is becoming an elitist system – much like Europe and Japan have practiced for years.