On February 1, 2010, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office issued a press release announcing President Obama's $2.3 billion budget request
for the USPTO for fiscal year 2011.
According to the statement, the amount of the budget request is intended to support and achieve the strategic objectives of the five-year plan for the USPTO as mapped out by Director Kappos and Commerce Secretary Locke. Specific goals include reducing application pendency and the existing application backlog, improving patent quality, enhancing IP protection and enforcement, and upgrading the Office's IT infrastructure and tools in order to achieve total electronic processing in patents and trademark IT systems. As first steps, the PTO plans to make progress toward these goals by restructuring management and workflow processes and hiring 1,000 patent examiners (search for positions here in each of fiscal year 2011 and 2012, specifically targeting former patent examiners and current IP professionals to increase initial examiner productivity.
On Tuesday, the Intellectual Property Owners
Association (IPO) paid particular attention to the fee setting authority
provision of the budget, noting in one of its "Daily News" items that, "the
USPTO would be authorized to raise existing statutory fees in 2011 by rule with
no limits specified." The item clarified further that the IPO has
consistently opposed prior proposals that would allow the USPTO to set its own
fees. IPO Executive Director Herb
Wamsley (at left) was quoted in the article and characterized the fee-setting provision as "a
blank check for the USPTO to raise fees that would open the door to increases
far higher than 15 percent."
On Wednesday, Hal Wegner (at right) put the focus on the IPO's
commentary concerning the proposed budget in his widely-read e-mail newsletter,
stating that in order for real improvement to be made in the USPTO, the patent
community would need to support the Administration in its many efforts,
including "fee flexibility in the coming year." In his criticism of the IPO's comments
against the proposed budget, he noted that the patent community can play an
important role in providing constructive criticism and simple suggestions to
help improve Office procedures, "but it is yet another matter to fail to
support important initiatives so necessary for fixing a broken system.
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