The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is celebrating the good news that, despite difficult economic conditions, Patent Cooperation Treaty international filings set a new record in 2011 with 181,900 applications – that's 10.7% up on 2010 and the fastest rate of growth since 2005. Top filing countries China, Japan and the US accounted for 82% of the total growth. Chinese telecommunications company ZTE Corporation was the biggest filer. There are loads of statistics on view, and names of companies and countries too, for those who (like this Kat) enjoy reading them. The past few years have been a period in which we have increasingly been forced to listen to the same mantra about the patent system being broken, if not actually dead or dying. Yet thanks to the patent system we're enjoying an ever-growing list of new products, services, processes -- and information about the world we live in, via increasingly searchable and accessible published documents for which mechanical translation facilities are reaching new standards of acceptability. This is not to say that the patent system can't be improved: of course it can be. But isn't it strange, says the IPKat, that, the more the broken the patent system is proclaimed to be, the more people seem to be intent on using it? Does that tell us more about the system itself -- or about those who say it's broken?