* Up 23 percent from 2010’s expected budget.
* Proposal to increase statutory patent fees by 15 percent.
* USPTO hoping to reduce average of 34.6 months to approve or reject a patent application.
links: FY2010 President’s Budget Request, USPTO Budget, Plans, and Reports.
(via U.S. patent office gets boost in Obama budget | Reuters)
The claim and continuation rules that were supposed to go into effect on November 1, 2007 are dying a slow death… thankfully.
via Law.com - PTO Rescinds Controversial Patent Rules.
EFS-Web is the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO’s) web-based patent application and document submission system. I have been filing all my documents electronically since the USPTO started beta testing electronic filing (and I am shocked to see that some law firms still do not use electronic filing). All documents filed via EFS-Web must be pdfs with embedded fonts, or image-based pdfs.
Rambus replied that the game is hardly over.
via eWeek.com Nvidia Scores Win Against Rambus in Patent Fight.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled Friday in a split decision that the Patent and Trademark Office did not overstep its authority in adopting a set of new rules that some intellectual property lawyers say fundamentally alter patent practice and threaten innovation.
via Law.com - Federal Circuit Sides With PTO in Dispute [...]
Method claim 1 does not recite any machine or apparatus or call for transforming an article into a different state or thing. A domain name is simply a series of characters representing the address of a resource, such as a server, on the World Wide Web.
Links: Ex parte Atkin.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office predicts that patent application filings will continue to increase to over 600,000 a year in 2012. Furthermore, there may be a backlog of around 1.4 million patents.