Posts Tagged: "expedited examination"

USPTO to Expand Initiatives for Under-Resourced Inventors and First-Time Filers

United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director Kathi Vidal penned a blog post today announcing several new programs aimed at expanding the U.S. innovation ecosystem, which she said “could quadruple the number of American inventors, and increase the GDP per capita by as much as 4%, or by about $1 trillion.” The initiatives are being spearheaded by the USPTO’s Council for Inclusive Innovation (CI2), for which Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo serves as Chair and Vidal as Co-Chair.

USPTO Expedited Processes for Examination and the New Petition to Make Special for Climate Change Inventions

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has a massive backlog of patent applications (typically in the hundreds of thousands). Indeed, the average wait for patent applicants to receive any substantive response from the USPTO is 19.4 months, and the wait is growing. (See chart below). Because of this situation, there has been a need for patent applicants to accelerate the process. The USPTO has obliged and provides several options discussed here for patent applicants to consider.

Hop on the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) via Australia

IP Australia actually has built into its quota system a driver for completing prosecution of open cases before taking up new cases. Therefore, there is a rule inside IP Australia that an Examiner must respond to communication from an applicant within 20 days of receiving the applicant’s communication. Oftentimes, it is sooner. Therefore, an application will not languish at the bottom of the Examiner’s work pile and the case will get attention from the Examiner in short order.

Strategic Uses of New USPTO Initiatives and Procedures: How to Improve Prosecution Expediency

As is evident from Figure 2, a significant problem affecting USPTO performance has been identified as the Request for Continued Examination (RCE) Backlog, which grow dramatically from 2009 into 2013. The intricacies of RCE practice go beyond the scope of this article, but it is RCE practice that is a primary problem facing the USPTO. At the end of the USPTO’s 2013 End of Fiscal Year, approximately 78,272 RCE applications were awaiting examination at the USPTO. These RCEs divert resources away from the examination of new applications.