Report: 75% of Patent Applications are approved

A new report from Lawrence B. Ebert indicates that 75% of patents are approved - the US PTO claims it is closer to 62% but because of the way that patents are processed, there is some ambiguity. Even the 62% approval rate seems at odds with patents being new, unique and non-obvious. Personally I would hope that the failure rate would be a lot higher. This seems in line with Tim Bray's comments on Linux Patents:

In software, assume that everything is already patented. You can’t build anything, no matter how new it is, without infringing someone’s patent.
Of course, a very high proportion of those patents could quite likely be invalidated by prior art, from both the patent space and outside. But that’s expensive; a patent is an extremely potent offensive weapon in the hands of a smart attorney, because most companies don’t have enough financial slack to fight intellectual-property litigation.