Source: https://www.patentprogress.org/2018/01/10/alice-drizzle-barely-even-noticeable/
Timestamp: 2019-04-26 06:29:46+00:00

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At the end of the year, I took a look at whether Alice really had a significant impact on patents as a whole. The answer was that Alice simply doesn’t affect that many patent applications. But several important questions were left unanswered. I also wanted to know whether the affected applications are really being affected by Alice, or if there are other reasons those applications might have been rejected.
We can take a look at that using BigQuery.
This doesn’t mean that these applications were abandoned because of the § 101 rejection—for example, a number were abandoned even though they were allowed because the applicant failed to pay the issue fee. It doesn’t even mean that the § 101 rejection wasn’t overcome—in some cases, the § 101 rejection is overcome and rejections over prior art lead to abandonment. All it means is that at some point a § 101 rejection was received, and the application was ultimately abandoned.
Still, this is the highest possible number of applications that could even arguably be considered to be abandoned for a reason that is in some way related to a § 101 rejection.
Let’s take a look at the opposite question—how many patent applicants overcome a § 101 rejection?
After receiving a § 101 rejection, 23,314 applications subsequently issued as patents, overcoming the § 101 rejection.
The final question is how many applications have neither been abandoned nor issued—how many applications have received a § 101 rejection at some point in time, and remain pending?
So, from this data, we can tell that, of the 64,647 applications receiving a § 101 rejection at some point in prosecution, 36% of applications have issued as patents, 34.1% have subsequently been abandoned, and 29.8% remain pending.
But, as mentioned above, that isn’t enough; just because an application received a § 101 rejection and was subsequently abandoned doesn’t mean that it was abandoned due to the § 101 rejection. For that, we need a more specific query. First, we generate a table containing the most recent office action for each application ID in the database.
After saving this table to a local dataset (in my case, I named it alice_drizzle_data.most_recent_oas_by_app_id), we can combine that table with our earlier abandonment search, and look for those applications where the last office action prior to abandonment does not contain a § 101 rejection.
This query tells us that, of the 22,047 patent applications which were abandoned after receiving a § 101 rejection, in 4,047 cases, the final office action prior to abandonment did not contain a § 101 rejection. In other words, 18% of those applications do not appear to have been abandoned due to § 101.
We can also perform a similar test to determine how many of the pending applications have overcome their § 101 rejections, so we can determine the possibility of overcoming an Alice rejection.
This tells us that, of the 19,286 currently pending applications that received a § 101 rejection at some point in their prosecution, 2,896 no longer have a pending § 101 rejection.
Based on this, we can determine that, of the 64,647 applications that received Bilski/Alice/Mayo/Myriad § 101 rejections, the rejection was overcome in 46.8% of cases. And again, referring back to my earlier post, most applications don’t receive a § 101 rejection in the first place. Alice simply does not impact most patent applications.
Finally, we can look at how many applications we can state with certainty were abandoned due to a § 101 rejection—the instances in which there were no other pending rejections in the last office action before abandonment.
In other words, § 101 is the sole reason for abandonment in a grand total of 3.3% of cases receiving a § 101 rejection, and of only 9.8% of abandoned applications receiving a § 101 rejection. § 101 rejections are actually overcome more than ten times as often as they represent the sole remaining block to patentability.
The Alice drizzle barely even merits an umbrella.

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