The increased issuance rate is probably the result of PTO's money crunch. Unlike most agencies, which supplement funds appropriate by Congress with collected fees, PTO is expected to be entirely self-supporting. Application fees. Continuation fees. Maintenance fees. Service fees. Everything that PTO does has a dollar sign attached to it (here's the fee schedule). Sometimes they don't even get to keep is all. Congress raided PTO's surplus several times during the boom to prop up the General Treasury. When rainy days came, companies started filing for fewer patents and some - gasp - even let patents lapse rather than paying their maintenance fees. As a result, PTO was forced to cut benefits dramatically. For awhile, overtime was off the table. The agency stopped paying tuition for examiners attending night law programs. Retention bonuses went away. Bad time to be an examiner.

The issuance boost means more continuations, re-applications, etc. along the way to approval = more revenue immediately. More importantly, PTO's got to issue nearly five patents to receive as much by way of maintenance fees in 3-4 years as they WOULD have received from an 11 year old patent that's been allowed to lapse.

Issuance rate won't (and from PTO's perspective, can't) go down unless or until Congress changes PTO's funding model or the economy turns around. Even if the economy gets better, it's going to take a few years for revenues to start increasing as the patents from the current glut start bringing in large maintenance fees and the issuance rate can go down without forcing staff cuts.

It's pretty close to being done here too. The scheduling orders linked on groklaw (last full sched and amendment) have summary judgment oppositions in October, replies in November, and a jury trial starting in February for any surviving claims. If that schedule is kept, the case should be done no later than April. Depending on the outcome, IBM may be entitled to reasonable attorney's fees.

As for the SCO's claims being fraudulent, as asserted in another response to the parent, that's awfully hard to establish. They may ultimately be dismissed or ruled on summarily but so far as I know IBM hasn't asked for Rule 11 sanctions, which you would normally do in the face of patently frivolous or fraudulent claims and before any meaningful discovery.

I personally doubt that the final SCO/IBM decision will be a groundbreaking and haven't taken the time to read all of the filings because it looks, on its face, to be a relatively mundane suit. I'd like to think that SCO is estopped from making its claims in the first place because they operated a Linux business that distributed the purportedly infringed code under GPL, inducing reasonable businesses (e.g., IBM) to use/market the same code under the assumption that there would be no claim of infringement. The case may very well be decided in a way that creates no meaningful precedent and the court could avoid some of the issues of interest to the FOSS community by, for example, deciding based on IBM/SCO contract provisions w/o discussing the GPL or Linux.

Regardless of the outcome, the U.S. and European systems are so different that it's not terribly fair to compare the District of Utah case with the cases in Germany and elsewhere. We could fairly knock the U.S. courts if an action had been brought and already disposed of in the United Kingdom :-)