The main purpose of the U.S. Constitution was to establish the basic rights of all American citizens and provide direction on how the government should work. During the colonial era, intellectual property (IP) in America was actually owned by Great Britain.
On January 31, 2011, the White House announced the launch of the Startup America initiative and noted that the Department of Commerce was “finalizing a plan to allow entrepreneurs to request faster review of their patents, an initiative that should lower patent pendency times overall and speed the deployment of new ideas to the marketplace.
From 2008 to 2012, the percentage of examiner interviews conducted for U.S. patent applications nearly doubled from about 15 to 30%. In 2012, 90% of applications in which examiner interviews were conducted were allowed, compared to a 61% allowance rate for patents in which no interviews were conducted. These trends have continued.
More than 30 years ago when I started my career as a patent examiner in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), there was a common phrase that went something like this: “Patents are not valid until they are litigated.”
Last year saw 5,769 new patent suits filed in federal district courts, representing a 15% increase over the previous year, with non-practicing entities (NPEs) filing two out of every three of these suits.
Almost 11,000 appeal decisions were made by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) during 2015, with an average of nearly 30 months for an appeal decision to be made.
I shop a lot on Amazon. Even when I do not buy from Amazon, I look up products on Amazon.com to read product ratings and reviews posted by other customers in order to help me decide on my purchases.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s (USPTO) September 7, 2010, Director’s Form: A Blog from USPTO’s Leadership addressed the then current backlog of more than 700,000 applications, efforts to reduce pendency and factors that contribute to examination delays.