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Patentdone
If a patent application is filed and the filing fees are paid, it could be ...
Patentdone
There are as many as more than 700,000 applications piled up in the USPTO and it ...
Opinions divided on patent reform impact
Rick Merritt
6/24/2011 5:36 PM EDT
All sides agree letting the patent office set and keep all its fees is an improvement, given the agency has a backlog of more than 700,000 applications and takes on average three years to grant a patent.
"The key to the reform bill is ending fee diversion to reduce wait times and improve quality of patents being issued," said Mike Mclean, a vice president at UBM TechInsights, an IP consulting and analysis group. "The compromise on that issue in the House bill is a step in the right direction, but the Senate bill is much stronger in that regard and as a result would be the preferred option," he said.
The bill also creates a new post-grant review process at the patent office, aiming to weed out bad patents early and reduce a backlog of court cases challenging the validity of patents.
The new review process "allows expert statements, deposition and discovery so it will be a much more adversarial proceeding," said Baum, noting the process has successfully reduced court challenges in Europe.
The new patent office review could cost "a couple hundred thousand dollars," more than twice as much as today's post-grant reviews, Baum said. But that's still well below the alternative of a court challenges than can cost an order of magnitude more.
"This gives small companies an option to have a more meaningful challenge, and big companies will use this extensively against one another, too," he said.
The House bill also lets a company already using a technology have a prior use right to it, even after a patent application is granted to another company. IBM and Intel welcomed the provision, though Intel said the language could be clearer for applying it to products as well as processes.
"We spend a very long time developing our [chip] manufacturing processes, and we want to keep them secret and not share them with competitors," said Simon. "We do patent a lot of it, and a lot of patents have issued on our tri-gate transistors for instance, but there's a lot of stuff we don’t patent but keep it secret," he said.
The bill also limits the ability to bring a single suit against many unrelated companies for infringing a patent, a provision Intel and other large companies praised. "These cases become huge unworkable messes," said Simon.
The House bill also ends the practice of suing companies for marking their products with patents that have expired. "Patent attorneys filed hundreds of these suits, and it's driving big companies nuts—it's an abuse of the system," said Baum.
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Sheetal.Pandey
6/26/2011 10:10 PM EDT
Well this is a very confusing topic as always atleast for me. Not sure why the patent issues always get stuck with national politics. It should be an science and technology/art domain.
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Dave.Dykstra
6/27/2011 1:10 AM EDT
And, of course, there will always be disagreement about what patent reform is the right reform. But I think almost everyone agrees that the current system needs to be changed. Just about any change would be an improvement and this certainly looks like it has a number of improvements for small companies and individuals.
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Simon7382
6/27/2011 6:36 PM EDT
We have to look at the final bill when it passed both houses. But, from what I have heard so far, this bill offers very few improvements for small companies and individual inventors and is heavily tilted toward the interests of behemoths like Intel and IBM. If so this is the wrong kind of bill, if the goal is to further and improve our innovation processes as a nation.
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goafrit
6/29/2011 6:11 AM EDT
This is the most difficult aspect of engineering. You create things and lawyers make billions out of it. Sometimes I do not know the one to choose. Leave patents and get lawyers out of this. But Congress full of lawyers seem to keep them in bsuiness more.
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Patentdone
8/25/2011 12:56 AM EDT
There are as many as more than 700,000 applications piled up in the USPTO and it usually takes as long as almost 3 years to grant a patent.
Also, there are inventors who are individuals and could not afford the high amount of the government fees although there are some discounts or tradeoffs.
These difficulties will get even more huge after the change from the first-to-invent system to the first-to-file system. Because an inventor have to file an application as soon as possible to protect his ideas.
There is a suggestion made attemped to solve this problem. The method discussed as follows may be called as Revoked-but-Not-Terminated(RNT).
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Patentdone
8/25/2011 12:57 AM EDT
If a patent application is filed and the filing fees are paid, it could be revoked but not terminated within the period of its life, say, 20 years from the filing date. If a patent is granted, it could be revoked but not terminated. In turn, the appicant or patentee should give a step back. His intellectual rights are not protected during the period being revoked. Anyone may utilize the invention during that period without paying the roylty fees at any time.
For example, if an inventor has filed an application and paid the filing fees, but he does not find a buyer and does not have an examination until 5 years later from the filing date, then the application is revoked during this period, anyone may utilize the invention freely during those 5 years and do not have to pay anything even after the patent is granted.
If the patent is issued 6 years later from the filing date, and tends to not sell well, the patentee may not pay the maintenance fees. And the patent is roylty free until the patentee paid 7.5 years after grant when he sees the patent tends to sell well.
As a result, many of the applications shall find it out that it is not in a hurry to be examined at all. Thus the patent office will free tension geatly and it will take much quicker speed to examine the applications really in a hurry.
Also, for one especially an indepent inventor who could not afford the patent fees, he could wait until he has sold out his invention to start an exmination.
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