Posts Tagged: "accelerated examination"

Last week USPTO Director David Kappos explained during his speech at IPO that intellectual property law “is widely recognized as the engine that drives our information age economy, maintains our competitiveness and is responsible for creating and sustaining tens of millions of U.S. jobs.” I have been beating this drum now for several years, and despite the obvious and indisputable…

The United States Patent Office announced on March 13, 2007 that it had just issued the first patent granted under the then newly minted accelerated examination program, which was first brought into effect in August of 2006. The patent in question, , U.S. Patent No. 7,188,939, was granted to Brother International, Ltd. from an application filed on September 29, 2006,…

I am writing to you live from Houston, Texas, where our summer long journey across America teaching the PLI Patent Bar Review Course finds us presently.  For those who are not familiar with Houston let me give you a quick weather report.  It is EXTREMELY HOT and EXTREMELY HUMID.  Luckily we are here at the South Texas College of Law,…

Yesterday I wrote about how the growing backlog of applications at the United States Patent and Trademark Office has caused the average time a patent application remains pending to rise to ridiculous levels. Some have contacted me to suggest that I am dead wrong to imply that the problem is getting worse given that the number of patent application is…

Many readers will recall that on March 16, 2009, I posted an article titled Perspective of an Anonymous Patent Examiner.  That post was and has been one of the most popular posts ever on the IPWatchdog.com Blog.  Therefore, I was quite pleased to receive another e-mail from the same anonymous patent examiner over the weekend.  Not only is this type…

On July 28, 1987, President Ronald Reagan set forth what became known as the “11-point superconductivity initiative” in a speech to the Federal Conference on Commercial Applications of Superconductivity.  As a part of President Reagan’s superconductivity initiative he proposed amendments to the antitrust laws to make it easier for companies to collaborate with respect to basic research, he requested changes to the Freedom…

There is a lot of money sitting on the sidelines just waiting for the climate to change enough to warrant investment.  By some estimates the amount of capital lying in wait is perhaps as much as $10 trillion.  With no end in sight on just how low the Dow will fall, fears that banks will become nationalized have spooked investors. …

After being told that patent reform in 2008 was all but a done deal, once again nothing happened.  I am happy that patent reform died in 2008 because the reforms that were being proposed were largely bad ideas, and they would have done absolutely nothing to address the many real and substantial problems that are facing the US patent system…