Posts Tagged: "third party submissions of prior art"

MIT Prior Art Archive: An Overstated Solution to Patent Examination

According to statistics provided by the USPTO, since the beginning of fiscal year 2012, the Office has received a total of only 1,584 third-party submissions of prior art for consideration by patent examiners. The high water mark occurred in 2016, when the office received a total of 329 third-party prior art submissions. This declined to 266 submissions in 2017 and in fiscal year 2018, the USPTO received a total of only 141 prior art submissions.

Using Anonymous Third-Party Submissions to Advance Your Business Goals

A decent patent strategy starts with protecting your current commercial product.  A better patent strategy builds on this by not only considering what is, but what could be.  To provide real value, consider the actions of others and invest time studying the patent landscape and gathering business intelligence from competitors’ filings.  Additionally, instead of passively observing such filings, a company should also consider being more active by filing one or more third-party submissions (often termed preissuance submissions) in their competitor’s pending applications.  These third-party submissions are a terrific defensive tool to slow down or impede your competitors’ patent ambitions.

The America Invents Act on Its Fifth Anniversary: A Promise Thus Far Only Partially Fulfilled

Unfortunately, Mr. President, after five years I cannot report back that the AIA has yet ”improve[d] patent quality and help[ed] give entrepreneurs the protection and the confidence they need to attract investment, to grow their businesses, and to hire more workers.” The current implementation of PTO post issuance proceedings is undermining confidence in our patent system, chilling innovation at its roots, and, in eyes of some, giving the AIA a bad name.

USPTO Hopes for More Submissions of Prior Art with New Patent Application Alert Service

The Patent Application Alert Service (PAAS), born of a partnership between the USPTO and Reed Tech, a LexisNexis company, is a system that provides customized email alerts to the public for free when a patent application is published. Users of the system create an account and then save one or more searches. Whenever a patent application relevant to the search publishes an email alert is automatically sent. The Patent Office is hopeful that the new system will lead to greater numbers of pre-issuance third party submissions of prior art.

USPTO Offers New Tool to Receive Email Alerts when Patent Applications Publish

Through a partnership with Reed Technology and Information Services, the USPTO announces the release of the Patent Application Alert Service. This system provides customized, email alerts to the public for free when patent applications of interest are published. Additionally, the system offers direct access to the published applications that meet your search criteria.