Posts Tagged: "fee setting authority"

Lisa Jorgenson, executive director of the American Intellectual Property Law Association (AIPLA), asked the agency to better justify the increased surcharge for late maintenance fee payments as well as the increases to IPR and PGR trials. Jorgenson noted that much of the additional work required by SAS Institute would take place after the institution decision and thus it might make more sense to divide the fee increase such that the pre-institution fees bear less of the increase than those charged post-institution. Roland McAndrews of the Intellectual Property Owners Association (IPO) also sought additional justification for the 525 percent increase to the late payment surcharge for maintenance fees, noting that the desire to encourage on-time payments alone didn’t support that increase… Josh Malone, inventor of Bunch O Balloons, noted that the day’s hearing on fee increases was “based on an unrealistic and aspirational value proposition,” namely that the fees paid for obtaining a patent would actually result in the grant of a patent which was backed by the full faith of the U.S. government.”

Sen. Harris followed up by asking whether algorithms were mathematical representations of laws of nature. “You’re getting right to the heart of the issue,” Iancu said. What Iancu said after that should be a major breath of fresh air to inventors and patent owners frustrated by Section 101 validity issues in the wake of Alice and Mayo: “This is one place where I believe courts have gone off the initial intent. There are human-made algorithms, human-made algorithms that are the result of human ingenuity that are not set from time immemorial and that are not absolutes, they depend on human choices. Those are very different from E=mc2 and they are very different from the Pythagorean theorem, for example.”

The USPTO issued a final rule to set or adjust certain patent fees as the agency is authorized to do under the America Invents Act (AIA) of 2011. The fee increases, which include some significant increases to petitioners filing for inter partes review (IPR) proceedings, are ostensibly meant to cover costs for USPTO operations, Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) operations and administrative services as the USPTO attempts to achieve strategic goals including backlog reductions and “patent quality enhancements.”… The OMB’s determination of the new fees as a “transfer payment” means that the rule isn’t subject to the requirements of Executive Order 13771, titled Reducing Regulation and Controlling Regulatory Costs and signed on January 30th of this year.