Posts Tagged: "patent office"

You may have heard, but the USPTO is hiring. Not only is the USPTO searching for Administrative Patent Judges, but they are finding some extremely well qualified candidates to add to the ranks of those already serving. With the permission of each of the new APJs, and the cooperation of James Smith, Chief Administrative Patent Judge, it is with pleasure that share the bios the newest APJs, each pictured with Rebecca Blank, Deputy Secretary of Commerce.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) will host the 2012 National Trademark Expo on Friday, Oct. 19, and Saturday, Oct. 20, at the USPTO’s headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. The free two-day event is designed to educate the public about trademarks and their importance in the global marketplace. Last year’s Trademark Expo attracted more than 15,000 visitors of all ages.

The USPTO has returned to the historical philosophy that patent examiners should work cooperatively with patent applicants to identify allowable subject matter and issue patents on what is allowable, not just focusing on rejection after rejection after rejection. While there are quite a few positive changes, with more in the works, Track One is by far the most successful policy initiative that has come to bear during the Kappos Administration. The only problem with Track One is that more applicants are not using it! What are you waiting for? A look at the numbers shows that Track One is a huge success and ought to be employed far more than it has been.

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM) announced on Friday, March 15, 2012, the launch of the USPTO/AUTM Patent Examiners Training Initiative, a joint program designed to improve the strength and quality of U.S. patents through specialized training between patent examiners, innovators and scientists.

The telework program affords employees the ability to work from home from 1 to 5 days a week, and the largest of these telework programs — the Patent Hoteling Program (PHP) — had 2,600 patent examiners participating at the end of fiscal year 2011. With so many patent examiners working from home does the “brain drain” affect the learning curve of new patent examiners who have fewer people around to help and mentor. The Inspector General’s report does not address the issue of “brain drain,” but does quite clearly demonstrate that those examiners that work from home are more productive than examiners who report to work on campus at the USPTO.

Contrary to popular belief, things are getting much better in business methods. Applications filed in 1999 had prosecution times of over 10 years (lower green arrow). These and subsequent applications jammed up the system leading to excessive delays to first office actions. Applications filed in 2004, for example, had delays to first office action of 6 years (middle red arrow). Sometime around 2010, however, things started to improve. A lot more patents started issuing and the delays to first office action dropped to around 2 years (upper red arrow). That’s not to say that it’s easy to get a patent in business methods, but at least examiners and applicants are making much better progress in reaching agreement on allowable claims in a reasonable amount of time.

Later in the month in Shreveport, Louisiana, the USPTO will hold its 2nd Annual Women’s Entrepreneur Symposium. This event will take place from March 25 – 26, 2012, and is co-sponsored by the USPTO, U.S. Senator Mary L. Landrieu and Cedric B. Glover, mayor of the City of Shreveport. The event will take place at the Shreveport Convention Center, and the symposium has blocked rooms at the Hilton Shreveport. Our very own Social Media Diva™, Renee Quinn, will be speaking at the symposium on the topic of building relationships. The full title of Renee’s presentation is From Inventor to Entrepreneur: Developing and Leveraging Relationships to Drive Growth.

Top 50 Law Firms with the most first action allowances according to PatentCore data. But where are these first action allowances coming from? All over the Patent Office really. They occur with plants (1661), organic compounds (1621, 1625, 1626), batteries (1725), active solid state devices (2818), electrical generators or motors (2834), optical systems and elements (2873), optics measuring and testing (2877), vehicle fenders (3612), data processing (3661), aeronautics and astronautics (3662), internal combustion engines (3748), valves (3751, 3753) and elsewhere throughout the USPTO.

So who is the villain in all of these wars responsible for again giving patents a bad rap? Well, the villain in not the ITC, USPTO or any U.S. government agency. Nor it is any country’s protectionist trade regime, or an “irreparably broken” U.S. or global patent system. No, the real villains here may very well be a handful of companies that willingly contributed patented technologies to various SSOs, championing their adoption and encouraging their use in a host of consumer electronics, and now claim (years later) that the very producers they encouraged to implement these standards should be barred from making, using or importing their products into the U.S. market.

While there is no doubt that the rejuvenation of the Patent Office during the Obama Administration is directly related to the capable and steady leadership of Director Kappos, I equally have no doubt that Pappas has played a major role in reshaping the public image of the USPTO. During the Bush Administration there was a feeling that the patent bar was the enemy, not to be trusted. The flow of information from the USPTO to the industry and public was largely non-existent. That has all changed and Pappas has been at the center of coordinating the USPTO with other government agencies and in coordinating the message so that the industry and public can know and understand what the USPTO is doing and why.

Indeed, competing globally is a prerequisite to success for most companies in what is an ever increasingly global marketplace. To compete globally American firms engage in licensing, franchising, or exporting. For many small companies it is patent protection that provides the only means to obtain an advantage over established industry leaders. Patent protection prevents established industry leaders from simply copying new innovations, and aids small businesses and start-ups in attracting investor capital needed to grow, build market share, and create jobs. Unfortunately, small companies face significant financial challenges in acquiring, maintaining, and enforcing patents outside the United States. What they need is a strategy to lay the foundation for foreign rights, building off a credible and appropriate U.S. patent filing.

On Thursday, March 1, 2012, at 2:00pm ET, the United States Patent and Trademark Office held a ceremony in the North Auditorium of the Madison Building on the campus of the USPTO. The ceremony was for the purpose of swearing in 9 new Administrative Patent Judges, with the oath of office being administered by Chief Judge Paul Michel (ret.) of the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.

In celebration of its mission to recognize and foster invention, the National Inventors Hall of Fame has announced its 2012 Inductees. The inventors to be honored this year created remarkable innovations that include the now ubiquitous laser printer commonly found in the workplace, the thin-film head technology that has contributed to the success of the disk drive industry, and the first statin which pioneered the class of drugs targeted at lowering cholesterol.

These proposed fees will undoubtedly be commented on, and the early criticism, which seems quite valid, asks how the addition of a single additional claim to be reviewed can add such large amounts to the cost. For example, if you file a petition for post-grant review and want 30 claims reviewed the fee will be $53,700. If you want 31 claims reviewed the fee will be $71,600, so that extra claim reviewed will cost you $17,900. Of course paying that $17,900 entitles you to bring challenges to 9 other claims, which would be free once you paid for the 31st claim. Essentially, with rigid segmentation of fees it is difficult, if not impossible, to see a cost of recover implementation at work. It would be far more in keeping with the statutory authority to have additional claim fees akin to what happens during prosecution when you go beyond three independent claims or 20 total claims.

hange does not come easily. At a minimum, the PTO must stop encouraging and rewarding examiners for actions that defeat the objectives of the office. As long as examiners are credited and rewarded for acting upon every application that they can force an applicant to file, examiners can be expected to seek the credit and reward, and the backlog will be with us. As long as examiner performance is based upon the conventional (N + D)/2, the incentives will foster counter-productive behavior in the examining corps and the Office will not make meaningful strides toward accomplishing its mission. Examiners will do what they are rewarded for doing – generating as many N’s and D’s as possible without regard to whether anything is really being accomplished.