At the 14th Annual Independent Inventors Conference on November 5-6, 2009, the United States Patent and Trademark Office announced it intends to launch a new pilot program whereby small entity inventors with multiple pending patent applications will be given the opportunity to receive special, accelerated status for one application in exchange for abandoning an application that has not been examined. David Kappos, Director of the USPTO, explained, “the program will accelerate protection for important innovations from independent inventors while reducing our unacceptable backlog. Getting these inventions to the marketplace quickly will also help stimulate the economy and create jobs.” The start date for the program has not been announced, but a press release from the USPTO explains that “additional details on the program will be available in the Federal Register and on the USPTO Web site in the weeks ahead.”
The backlog of patent applications is often cited as a major contributing factor to the delay in patent examination at the USPTO. According to information published on the patent law blog Patently-O, in a review of public information available for eight thousand randomly selected patent applications filed between 2001 and 2006, the time between the filing of the patent application and the first substantive response from the USPTO was approximately two years. The USPTO is looking for creative ways of dealing with the ever growing backlog of unexamined patent applications and it will be interesting to see if this new pilot is effective in both in reducing the patent application backlog and in providing faster examination for the targeted applications.
Tags: patent examination, patent law, uspto
