Posts Tagged: "patent prosecution"

The USPTO continues to issue patents related to biotechnology and organic chemistry inventions despite the Supreme Court rulings and USPTO guidelines implementing the ruling related to the scope of patentable subject matter. Although the sky has not fallen, applicants must expect more rejections under 35 U.S.C. § 101 and must budget for more office actions before receiving an allowance from TC 1600. Furthermore, applicants can expect these challenges in several art unit groups, particularly in art unit group 1630. As a matter of strategy, if a rapid allowance is sought, applicants should carefully draft applications and claims to comply with the Interim Guidelines and utilize options to speed prosecution. Because of the uncertainty in the relevant case law and its rapidly evolving nature, applicants should consider whether to appeal intractable rejections under § 101. Further analysis is necessary to determine whether appeals of rejections under § 101 by TC 1600 are successful.

“Time is money” rings especially true for those pursuing patents at the USPTO. Anyone who has previously dealt with this organization can attest to the fact that it is slow moving and extremely costly. Being that this single government entity is charged with processing upwards of 600,000 patent applications per year, the speed at which it operates is unsurprising. However, what is surprising is the substantial variance in speed at which each technology center and individual art unit operates. For example, technology center 2900 has the quickest average time to disposition while technology center 2400 has the slowest.

Perhaps the most shocking difference between Track One applications and standard applications is allowance rate. Standard applications have an allowance rate of 70%; however, Track One applications are approved 89% of the time. Put another way, a Track One application is 19 percentage points more likely to receive an allowance than a standard application.

The availability of information to gain insights based on what is happening to others who are similarly situated means decision makers can leverage the experiences of many when determining how best to proceed. For example, in the patent world if you file an application that gets classified in Class 705 that means you have little or no meaningful chance to obtain a commercially relevant patent. Truthfully, you have little or no chance to obtain any patent really. So what decision do you make moving forward? Are you going to continue to throw good money after bad money to wage a fight that you realistically have virtually no statistical chance to win?

This was the SAWS program; an oversight procedure for bringing information to the attention of management. It was designed, by intention, to cast a broad and sweeping net. It was designed to permit resources to be brought to bear on high profile or complex legal, ethical, or controversial subject matter… The SAWS program is not a system of stalling patents. While the Bereznak Article asserts “(a)ny application that is categorized in SAWS … is placed in a special type of patent purgatory.” This is just not true.

Although the Supreme Court in Alice declined to provide an express definition of “abstract idea,” the opinion is packed with evidence that the Court intended for the term “abstract idea” to apply not to any “abstract idea” in the colloquial sense, but only more specifically to abstract ideas that are fundamental practices long prevalent in their fields… [A]lthough the Court did not provide a definition of “abstract idea,” its reasoning implies that it intended to limit the concept of “abstract ideas” to those concepts which are fundamental and long prevalent, possibly to concepts which have been well-known and extensively used for hundreds of years. An even more narrow, but very reasonable, interpretation of Alice, given the opinion’s strong emphasis on the risk hedging claims in Bilski, the “intermediated settlement” concept allegedly embodied in the claims at issue in Alice, and the repeated references to “economic practices,” “finance class,” “commerce,” and “the modern economy,” is that the Court intended for “abstract ideas” to be limited primarily or entirely to financial methods.

When reading patents it is not at all unusual for a patent to be issued a number of years after the original patent application was filed, but it isn’t every day that you see a patent issue more than 12 years after it was originally filed. Yet, that was exactly what happened with respect to the ‘327 patent application to HP. Worse yet, after HP successfully prevailed on claims in an appeal to the Board the case goes back to an examiner who for the first time raises a rejection never before made, while still continuing to make additional obviousness rejections. In short, this reads like the story of an application that examiners never wanted to issue in the first place… What if this applicant were a small business or individual? Had this applicant not been HP and instead a small company, would any patent be obtained despite the fact that the Board twice reviewed the claims and twice disagreed with the patent examiner? Of course not. Had this application been filed by an individual or entity with few resources the application would have been abandoned. Buried by a patent process that couldn’t care enough to administer justice in any kind of a timely fashion. That is rather pathetic. Getting a patent issued should not have taken 12 years, and resolving the application should not have taken more than 5 years after the first appeal was successful!

The first time you will substantively hear from the examiner is when the examiner issues what is referred to as a First Office Action on the Merits (FOAM). At this point you are now truly beginning what most would refer to as prosecution of the patent application. The examiner has told you what, if anything, he or she thinks is patentable, and explained (usually in abbreviated fashion) what claims are lacking and why. The applicant, or attorney, must respond to each and everything raised by the examiner in a response filed no later than 6 months after the date of the First Office Action. Notwithstanding the 6 month period to respond, the Patent Examiner will set what is called a “shortened statutory period” to respond, which for an Office Action is 3 months. The shortened statutory period is the time period within which you can respond without having to pay a fee to respond. After the shortened statutory period, which can be 1, 2 or 3 months depending on what the Examiner sends, you can respond up to 6 months but only if you request AND pay for an automatic extension. Automatic extensions can get expensive, the cost goes up depending on how many months of extension you have to purchase. They are called automatic extensions because the Patent Office must grant the extension if you ask and pay for the extension. You should, however, plan on doing things within the shorten statutory period in order to conserve funds and in order to get the maximum patent term.