Posts Tagged: "rulemaking"

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today announced a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) that will be officially published in the Federal Register tomorrow and that addresses a subset of issues from the controversial April 2023 Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM). USPTO Director Kathi Vidal received criticism following the ANPRM, most notably from Congress. In a House IP Subcommittee meeting held last year, members of the Subcommittee expressed confusion about the ANPRM and suggested Vidal may have been exceeding her authority with some of the proposals.

Federal Trade Commission (FTC)  Chair Lina Khan announced yesterday that there will be a Special Open Commission Meeting held on April 23 to vote on whether to issue a final version of the January 2023 proposed rule that would ban employers from using noncompete clauses for their employees. “The proposed final rule being considered would generally prevent most employers from using noncompete clauses,” said the Open Commission Meeting’s event description. “As the Notice of Proposed Rulemaking explained, noncompetes are a widespread and often exploitative practice that suppresses wages, hampers innovation, and blocks entrepreneurs from starting new businesses.”

I have been critical of certain National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) proposals to alter the regulations related to the Bayh-Dole Act, in 2021 (Notice of Proposed Rulemaking, NPR), and specifically, the NIST “Framework” published for comments in December, 2023.  My Comments submitted in February addressed numerous legal infirmities, ranging from construction analysis to demonstrated ambiguity problems of the Request for Information/Comments (RFI) itself. 

There are many views on the significance of In re Chestek, No. 2022-1843 (February 14, 2024) to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) rulemaking process. One question I have asked myself is what I would do differently after Chestek if I were still involved in rulemaking at the USPTO. The simple answer is almost nothing: I would cite Chestek instead of the other decisions in the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) section of a proposed or final rule.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) today that would allow practitioners who are not registered with the USPTO patent bar to act as lead counsel in proceedings before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). The Office has decided to propose that practitioners must still be represented by a registered practitioner, but to allow parties to “designate a non-registered practitioner as lead counsel and the registered practitioner as back-up counsel.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) today said in a precedential decision that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) did not need to engage in notice-and-comment rulemaking to require trademark applicants and registrants to provide a physical street address with their trademark applications. The court took the case as an opportunity to directly address “when a rule is procedural and excepted from notice-and-comment rulemaking as a ‘rule[] of agency organization, procedure, or practice.’”

The U.S. Copyright Office issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking in the Federal Register today offering a new group registration option for frequently updated news websites. According to the Federal Register Notice (FRN), the option would allow online news sites to register “a group of updates to a news website as a collective work with a deposit composed of identifying material representing sufficient portions of the works, rather than the complete contents of the website.”

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today announced that a final rule will be published tomorrow, November 16, in the Federal Register implementing a design patent practitioner bar. The Office first published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to the Federal Register in May 2023 contemplating a separate design patent practitioner bar. A request for comments (RFC) was also published in October 22.

One of the many amici who have filed briefs in a Supreme Court case asking the Court to overrule its precedent in Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. told the justices last week that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is abusing the so-called Chevron doctrine “to bypass the procedures that ensure that the agency considers the public interest.” The “Chevron doctrine” says courts should defer to administrative agencies’ interpretation of the statutes delegated to them. In the 1984 ruling in Chevron, U.S.A., Inc. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., the Supreme Court held that a court “may not substitute its own construction of a statutory provision for a reasonable interpretation made by [the agency charged with administering the statute],” where the statute is ambiguous.

Today, the Federal Register published a final interim rule submitted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) that will eliminate provisions within the agency’s rules of practice establishing a voluntary program for certifying the completion of continuing legal education (CLE) credits by registered patent practitioners and those granted limited recognition to practice in patent matters before the USPTO. The elimination of the voluntary CLE program follows a series of criticisms raised over the agency’s lack of compliance with federal administrative law statutes meant to objectively quantify the burden of agency rulemaking on stakeholders.

In an amicus brief filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC) on Friday, September 16, David E. Boundy is backing Chestek PLLC’s appeal asking the CAFC to vacate a Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) judgment that upheld an examiner’s refusal of the mark CHESTEK LEGAL for failure to comply with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) “domicile address requirement.” This requirement originates from the USPTO’s proposed rule issued on February 15, 2019, and subsequent final rule published on July 2, 2019. The changes were ostensibly intended to crack down on fraudulent trademark filings, which have posed a significant problem for the Office in recent years, by requiring that foreign applicants engage U.S. counsel.

This two-part article explains the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) practices with respect to powers of attorney. The pattern of neglect of administrative law identified here with regard to powers of attorney alone imposes a $30 to $40 million per year excess burden on the public. For the USPTO’s rules as whole, the costs are about $2 billion per year. Over the last 18 months, about 100 patent attorneys signed on to letters to ask the USPTO to do the simple right thing: conform its practices to the rule of law.

Yesterday, a group of 324 American innovators sent a letter to the bipartisan leadership of the Senate and House Judiciary Committees to express support for several improvements in the patent system implemented by U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director, Andrei Iancu, over the last several years. The letter also expressed support for recently proposed rulemaking concerning the USPTO’s discretion in instituting inter partes review Proceedings (IPR). The group of innovators included universities, nonprofit foundations, individual inventors, startups, small businesses, manufacturing, technology and life sciences companies.

On October 20, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published a “Request for Comments on Discretion To Institute Trials Before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board” in the Federal Register. In particular, the USPTO is considering the codification or modification of its current policies and practices with respect to instituting trials before the Office under the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA). The Office submitted a proposed rulemaking to the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) last month with the aim of formalizing recent practices under precedential opinions including Apple Inc. v. Fintiv, Inc; General Plastic Industries Co. Ltd. v. Canon Kabushiki Kaisha; and Becton, Dickinson & Co. v. B. Braun Melsungen AG.