Posts Tagged: "patent budget"

Driving Value Through In-House & Law Firm Collaboration

Collaboration opportunities between innovator and patent attorneys throughout the various stages of the innovation to commercialization cycle provide an increasingly important mechanism for clients to keep patent costs within budget, while maintaining focused protection on core technologies with business relevance.

Without Solution to Shutdown, PTO Patent Operations Funded until Mid-February

In a statement issued late Thursday afternoon, the United States Patent and Trademark Office announced that without a solution to the government shutdown the Office will soon run out of money. “In the absence of an appropriations bill, we have no authority to access fees collected since [the government shutdown] in accordance with the law,” read a notice posted to the USPTO.gov website late this afternoon. “Based on current estimates and expenditure rates, we expect our reserves to fund patent operations to last until at least the second week in February, and trademark operations to last until at least mid-April 2019.”

Is Trump being bamboozled by Obama holdovers on patent policy?

The USPTO’s Obama holdovers Michelle Lee and Tony Scardino are simply co-opting the exact language used in Obama’s budgets for fiscal years 2015 to 2017 into Trump’s 2018 budget and then directly attributing Obama’s policies and statements to President Trump even though Trump has never taken a position on anti-patent legislation… Are these failed Obama era policies now carried over into the Trump Administration by Obama holdovers simply mistakes? Some sort of scrivener’s error? Or is it a direct attempt to carry over failed Obama policies in the name of President Trump? You be the judge. Perhaps you can tell me: Is Trump being googled by Obama holdovers? Or is Trump himself the swamp?

USPTO gets $3.6 billion in President’s FY 2018 budget, avoids fee diversion

Under President Trump’s FY 2018 budget the USPTO will receive $3,586,193,000 from fees collected and to be available until expended. This appropriation would result in $0 being provided to the USPTO from the general fund of the United States. Any fees collected by the USPTO in excess of that amount would be deposited into the Patent and Trademark Fee Reserve Fund and remain available until expended. There does not appear to be any mention of any fee diversion anywhere, which would mean the USPTO has dodged the fee diversion hands of an often greedy federal government who over the last 30 years has frequently diverted user fees to other purposes.

Rethinking the Annual Patent Application Filing Target

Many a Chief IP Counsel (“CIPC”) annually determine, at the end of the fourth quarter or the beginning of the first quarter, patent application filing targets for their enterprise. This exercise is most usually dictated by a C-suite executive (e.g., GC, CFO, CTO, COO, or CEO) in order to allocate an IP budget. After all, the commonly-held belief in the corporate world is that if you do not set a budget, every dollar spent is over budget. Right!? Thus, we ask: “Should we be setting annual (‘hard’ or ‘soft’) filing targets in the first place and, if so, how do we go about setting them?” The answer to the above questions no doubt varies among enterprises of varying number of employees, revenue, industry, and corporate culture. Those CIPC who are forced, or otherwise feel compelled, to set a patent application filing target must inform their C-suite of an exact number. The calculus of that number is essentially determining how many patent applications should their enterprise be filing of the 2.9 million patent applications filed globally (including the 1.1M filed in China and the 589K filed in the United States last year). Well, there is no doubt that such calculus may not only be more art than science, but may very well be placing the cart before the horse (i.e., predicating an enterprise’s level of innovation on what may be an arbitrary, legal department created fiction).