Yearly Archives: 2016

Peter S. Menell Koret Professor of Law and Director Berkeley Center for Law & Technology University of California at Berkeley School of Law I submit these comments in response to the PTO’s Request for Comments on Enhancing Patent Quality (80 FR 6475 (Feb. 5, 2015)). These comments represent my own ...

Proposal 1 Under Pillar 1: OPQA Review Richard B. Almon Use PTO’s Critics to Enhance Patent Quality Donald L. Champagne Opening the Prosecution History’s Black Box Bernard Chao Adding to PLUS: The Promise of Automated Pre-Examination Search Andrew Chin Common Knowledge and Non-Patent Literature in the Internet Age Jorge L. ...

May 5, 2015 Commissioner for Patents of the United States Patent and Trademark Office Attn: Michael Cygan Senior Legal Advisor, Office of Patent Legal Administration Office of the Deputy Commissioner for Patent Examination Policy P.O. Box 1450 Alexandria, VA 22313-1450 via email: WorldClassPatentQuality@uspto.gov Re: Comments in response to USPTO’s Request ...

Michael D. Frakes and Melissa F. Wasserman Policymakers have long posited that the Patent and Trademark Office may be allowing too many low quality patents in part because patent examiners are not given sufficient time to conduct high-quality review of patent applications. Such sentiments have been echoed by patent examiners ...

Michael D. Frakes and Melissa F. Wasserman Commentators have noted two key concerns with the patent system in recent years—the quality of patents that the Patent and Trademark Office (PTO or Agency) issues and the crippling backlog of applications facing the PTO. We believe that these two concerns are not ...

Brenda M. Simon The quality of prior art located for a given application is limited by ability and resources. Automated searching has the potential to mitigate some of these constraints, though the risk of overreliance might offset some of its benefits. Increased use of automated searching may facilitate consideration of ...

Ted Sichelman Currently, the USPTO essentially treats every patent application as if each were “created equal.” However, from an economic standpoint, patent quality is more important for certain types of patents than others—namely, those patents that if wrongly issued (or wrongly denied at the application stage) would have a substantial ...

We greatly appreciate the USPTO’s outreach to the community in its efforts to enhance patent quality. We write in response to the USPTO’s requests for comments on enhancing patent quality. As academics who research and teach in the area of patents, we commend the USPTO on attempting to improve its ...

C. Wook Pak and Mark D. Nielsen The compact prosecution model has yet to be achieved because examiners, desiring to dispose of an application quickly, tend to give unreasonably broad interpretations to the claim terms in order to allow them to quickly find a reference that can serve as a ...

April 27, 2015 I appreciate the opportunity to submit comments for improving patent quality. The following comments address issues specifically regarding patent drawings. The United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) rules and regulations for patent drawings are at times confusing, and in some instances vague. However, they still have ...