This appears to benefit large corporations with large portfolios of applications at the expense of small businesses and individual inventors.

It may encourage entities to file unimportant applications (that they would not ordinarily have filed) so that they can later sacrifice them in favor of more important applications.

There was no discussion per se, but there was discussion of post grant review, which I hope to be able to write about over the next couple days. It seems that Kappos knows the standard for post grant review needs to be high, so that would suggest he has his eye on the reexamination backlog, and any backlog that could be created by new post grant procedures. He also said that coupled with any new post grant review he wants a 12 month limit on bringing challenges, no serial challenges and he wants the equivalent of a “gold star” to be placed on the patent once the post grant review is up or after the 12 month period has lapsed. He was talking to inventors, so “gold star” seemed to be to use language they could relate to. I get the sense that he wants to cut off challenges to patents, resulting in a stronger patent that is susceptible to fewer challenges after the 12 month period or post grant review. Something that would reduce uncertainty and should lead to more settled rights that investors would prefer.

Thanks for reading.

-Gene

Any discussion at the conference about the ever-growing backlog of reexaminations? I saw recent USPTO statistics about the number of reexamination requests being filed and it is obvious that this is another major problem in the making. With the backlog in getting patents through reexam starting to get longer and longer, I hope that PTO management is going to give some attention to this problem, too.

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