Posts Tagged: "patent prosecution"

Last week on Monday, November 23, 2009, while so many of us were winding down, clearing off our desks and getting ready for the Thanksgiving Holiday, the United States Patent and Trademark Office announced that the Government of India has granted the agency’s patent examiners access to a new digital database containing a compilation of traditional Indian knowledge. This was…

David Kappos, the Director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office, unveiled yesterday a series of proposals to bring significant change to the examiner “count system” – the methodology for determining the time a patent examiner has to complete a patent examination and how much credit is given for each stage of an examination. In the past I have…

Last week I gave an interview to Mark McCarty at Medical Device Daily, which published on Monday, August 17, 2009.  We had a good conversation for almost two hours about all kinds of patent topics.  Sometimes when you talk to reporters you never really know whether they are following what you are saying, whether they will wait for that one…

Something came up in the comments to a post earlier today and I want to address it and definitively debunk the rewriting of history that seems to already be started with respect to who is to blame for the problems of the patent system.  The question arises with respect to whether the Patent Office has created their own mess by…

The United States Patent Office announced on March 13, 2007 that it had just issued the first patent granted under the then newly minted accelerated examination program, which was first brought into effect in August of 2006. The patent in question, , U.S. Patent No. 7,188,939, was granted to Brother International, Ltd. from an application filed on September 29, 2006,…

On that fateful day some 27 months ago, April 30, 2007 to be precise, the United States Supreme Court decided that the well established and functional bright line rule for obviousness was too rigid.  No longer must there be a teaching, motiviation or suggestion to render an invention unpatentable for obviousness reasons.  No in this new brave world we need…

I spent the better part of last week in Washington, DC conducting Examiner interviews for some of my clients that have pending software patent applications. The great news is that I believe we now have a handle on the ever changing Bilski ruling. I know it sounds like a misstatement to say that the Bilski ruling is ever-changing, but apparently,…

Many readers will recall that on March 16, 2009, I posted an article titled Perspective of an Anonymous Patent Examiner.  That post was and has been one of the most popular posts ever on the IPWatchdog.com Blog.  Therefore, I was quite pleased to receive another e-mail from the same anonymous patent examiner over the weekend.  Not only is this type…

The United States Patent & Trademark Office has just released the 2008 Performance and Accountability Report, which is the annual report explaining the activities of the Office during fiscal year 2008.  While so much of the report is a self congratulating look back at what the Dudas Administration believes it effectively achieved over the past year, the report should be anything…