Posts Tagged: "issue fee"

PPAC Fee Hearing Discusses Proposed Increases to Late Payments, AIA Trial Fees

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.”

New Patent Fees: USPTO Exercises Fee Setting Authority

The final rules on patent fees will publish in the Federal Register on Friday, January 18, 2013. Fees are going up for most, but not as much as feared. It will be more expensive to file a utility patent application, except for micro-entity applicants (see Utility Filing Fees Table), but it will be less to pay the issue fee once you get a Notice of Allowance (see Issue Fee Table). It will cost 29% more to file the first RCE for large and small entities (see First RCE Fees Table), and 83% more for subsequent RCE filings for large and small entities (see Subsequent RCE Fees Table). The ex parte reexaminations fees are much lower, down 32% and 66% respectively for large and small entities (see Reexam Fees Table), but are still much higher compared to where they were prior to them being raised over 600% recently. Of course, cutting ex parte reexamination fees means the overall cost is still roughly 250% higher for small entities and 500% higher for large entities than this time last year.

Patent Office Technology: Improving Efficiency with ePetitions

“The ePetitions program is an instrumental part of the USPTO’s continuing efforts to expand its eCommerce capabilities and augment its ability to provide new tools and services to patent practitioners,” said Commissioner for Patents Robert Stoll. “Online filing of these specific ePetitions offers an important time saving advantage to petitioners as these submitted petitions are auto-processed and decided immediately upon receipt by the USPTO.”

USPTO Automates Filing of Patent Petitions

The automated petition process uses the USPTO’s new e-Petition system. With e-Petition the data is input through a secure web interface and the petition is decided automatically, eliminating months of waiting for these types of petitions to be docketed, decided and uploaded into Public PAIR (Patent Application Information Retrieval).