By Donald Zuhn --
USPTO Declines to Extend Patent Application Backlog Reduction Stimulus Plan
In a Federal Register notice published earlier this month (76 Fed. Reg. 77979), the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced that it had decided not to extend the Patent Application Backlog Reduction Stimulus Plan, which was implemented in November 2009 (see "USPTO Implements Patent Application Backlog Reduction Stimulus Plan"). Under the plan, an applicant would be able to have an application accorded special status for examination after expressly abandoning another copending unexamined application. In explaining its decision not to extend the program, the Office stated that the "plan has fulfilled its purpose." While the notice provided no data on the number of applications that were abandoned under the program, the Office stated that "[f]ilings under this plan reached a peak in late 2010 and have since steadily decreased."
USPTO Begins Delivery of Search Results to EPO
On Thursday, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced that it had begun providing the European Patent Office with search results for all publicly available U.S. patent applications. According to the USPTO, the delivery of search results is intended to assist applicants filing in the EPO to comply with amended Rule 141(1) of the EPO’s implementing regulations to the European Patent Convention (EPC). The amended rule, which took effect on January 1, 2011 and applies to all European patent applications filed after that date, requires applicants to file a copy of search results from a patent application to which the European patent application claims priority. The Office noted that it would also deliver search results for unpublished U.S. patent applications to the EPO provided that the U.S. patent application has cleared national security review and the applicant has submitted Form PTO/SB/69 (note: practitioners who attempt to access this form directly from the USPTO Forms page will find that the link for this form is broken; the link above, however, functions properly). The USPTO has not instituted a fee for delivery of search results to the EPO.
USPTO Adds Two New ePetitions
Last week, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office announced in a Patents Alert e-mail that beta versions of two new ePetitions had been made available via the EFS-Web. The new ePetitions are a Petition for Revival of an Abandoned Patent Application Abandoned Unintentionally (37 CFR 1.137(b)) (For Cases Abandoned After 1st Action and Prior to Notice of Allowance) and a Petition to Correct Assignee After Payment of Issue Fee (37 CFR 3.81(b)). The new additions bring the total of ePetitions to ten. For more information regarding ePetitions, practitioners should consult the Office's ePetitions Resource Page.
Don, Form SB69 would seem to be important only for applicants whose Paris Convention priority filing is a US non-provisional application, since obviously there are no search results to report for provisional applications. Do you know if statistics are available for how many PCT or EPO applications are filed in which Paris convention priority is claimed from a US non-provisional versus such applications in which priority is claimed from a US provisional?
Posted by: Dan Feigelson | December 28, 2011 at 02:46 AM