Source: http://www.patentlyo.com/patent/2008/12/index.html
Timestamp: 2013-12-12 09:59:50
Document Index: 75432184

Matched Legal Cases: ['§1214', 'Application No. 10', '§101', '§103', '§112', '§1214']

In a recent working paper, two European economists studied the price elasticity of demand for patents based on data from past twenty-five years. Their empirical result – the demand for patents is responsive to price, but relatively inelastic. I have created the following table showing where their result fits in the overall elasticity schema of goods and services. Good
Chevrolet Automobiles 4.0
Elasticity is simply a way to measure (or estimate) the how the demand for a good changes in response to a change in the price of that good. Their results essentially show that pricing mechanisms could be effective in shaping applicant behavior, but that a significant result would require a dramatic change in fees. From a historical perspective, the authors attribute at least part of the "boom" in patent filings to a relative fee reduction and generally "very inexpensive" fees. "Higher fees would … [help] reduce the upward trend in propensity to patent." Notes: Read the paper: On the Price Elasticity of Demand for Patents by Gaetan de Rassenfosse and Bruno van Pottelsberghe de la Potterie. [LINK] Historical data is only available for a limited range of pricing schemes. In his paper on Patent Demand Tim Wilson proposes raising the patent filing fee to $50,000 with the assumption that the demand for patents becomes more elastic as the price becomes dramatically higher. Posted on Dec 30, 2008 at 01:07 PM in Academic Studies, Articles and Publications | Permalink
Even after the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI) reverses an examiner's rejection, the case is returned to the same examiner to ensure that the application is in condition for allowance. 37 CFR 41.54. At that point, the examiner is not allowed to make another search for prior art. However, the examiner may reopen prosecution and enter a new grounds for rejection "[i]f the examiner has specific knowledge of the existence of a particular reference or references which indicate nonpatentability of any of the appealed claims." MPEP §1214.04. According to the MPEP, reopening prosecution requires written approval of the Technology Center Director. To get a sense of how this post-reversal process operates in practice, I looked at a set of 149 decisions from 2006 where the BPAI had reversed examiner rejections. In 80% of cases, the examiner accepted the BPAI decision and did not re-open prosecution. In these cases, a patent generally issued within nine-months of the BPAI decision (median of six months) unless the applicant caused some delay. A typical delay is seen in IBM's Application No. 10/047,116. After winning an appeal on nonobviousness grounds and receiving a notice of allowance, IBM failed to pay the issue fee in a timely fashion. The patent finally issued after the PTO granted a petition to revive. In the remaining 20% of the reversals, the PTO re-opened prosecution by offering new grounds for rejection. Occasionally the new grounds are suggested by the BPAI but more often they come from the examiner and fall under §101, §103, or §112. The current status of those re-opened cases from my 2006 sample can roughly be broken into thirds: a third of the cases were eventually patented despite the new rejection; a third of the cases are still pending; and a third of the cases were abandoned after the PTO continued to press its case. A handful of the pending cases are on their way to the BPAI for a second go-round. Notes: One PTO insider takes issue with my statement that after being reversed "the examiner is not allowed to make another search for prior art." The MPEP §1214.04 states that "[t]he examiner should never regard such a reversal as a challenge to make a new search to uncover other and better references." According to the insider, that statement is not a prohibition on making a new search, but only a "discouragement." In practice, new searches are conducted and, if new art is found the PTO will reopen prosecution. Posted on Dec 30, 2008 at 03:40 AM in Academic Studies, Articles and Publications, BPAI | Permalink
USPTO News: Although the move has been in the works for some time, Raymond Chen is now Solicitor of the USPTO and Deputy General Counsel for Intellectual Property Law. Chen's JD is from NYU. He also has a BS in electrical engineering from the UCLA. Prior to joining the solicitor's office, Chen was a technical assistant at the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit. Chen's parents were both engineers as well. Voting: Patently-O is in second place in the ABA Blog championship. Vote for Patently-O here. Suing the Software Giants: In 1998 three central-Indiana inventors filed for patent protection iconic software. The claims – finally issued in 2008 – cover a method of using icons that look like the content of the files they represent. The first named inventor – Greg Swartz – moved to Arizona and has recently filed an infringement complaint in that state. Defendants include Google (Chrome Browser), Microsoft (Vista), and Apple (iPhone). (U.S. Patent No. 7,346,850; ArsTechnica). The Niro firm is representing the patent holder – Cygnus Systems. An additional continuation is pending. The complaint can be found through Stanford's LexMachina Database. Posted on Dec 29, 2008 at 05:14 AM in Bits and Bytes | Permalink
Gilbert Hyatt has been famous for his early microprocessor patents. This appeal "concerns the patentability of approximately 2,400 claims in twelve related patent applications … that claim priority … to the early 1980s or before." Since being filed, all twelve applications have also been "amended to add hundreds of claims that were not included in the original applications."
The PTO examiner rejected all the claims in all twelve applications – most commonly for lacking proper written description. On appeal, the BPAI refused to independently review each of Hyatt's claims, and instead only considered the twenty-one claims that he had discussed in the "Summary of the Invention" section of the BPAI briefs. Appealing that decision, Hyatt convinced the DC district court that the BPAI had improperly selected the representative claims. The PTO now appeals that district court decision. On appeal, the Federal Circuit affirmed – finding that the BPAI cannot create a representative claim by simply grouping all claims rejected for lacking written description under the same "ground of rejection" "unless the claims share a common limitation that lacks written description support." 37 CFR 1.192(c)(7). "[T]he applicant can waive appeal of a ground of rejection, and can waive the right to demand additional subgrouping of claims within a given appealed ground. But the applicant cannot waive the Board's obligation to select and consider at least one representative claim for each properly defined ground of rejection appealed."Affirmed. On remand, the BPAI must consider "all grounds of rejection challenged by Hyatt. . . However, the Board is free on remand to apply the rule of waiver to any grounds of rejection not contested by Hyatt in his initial appeals to the Board, provided that such grounds do not become relevant on remand due to realignment of the representative claims or other aspects not previously at issue." Notes: 2400 claiming priority thirty years back…
Posted on Dec 28, 2008 at 10:54 AM | Permalink
The US Chamber of Commerce has released a set of recommendations for President Elect Obama in dealing with the USPTO. Some highlights below: Comparing the past twenty years:
YearBudget (Mil)Patent ExaminersNew AppsTotal BacklogPendency (Months)1988$1441,540148,000268,000