Good news and bad news from the USPTO

Both good and bad news is coming out of the USPTO recently. On the bad news front, patentees could face higher fees, which were proposed by the USPTO in accordance with the Leahy-Smith America Invents Act. Some design patent fee increases are fairly modest; those for design patent examination and search fees would increase by 213 percent and 250 percent, respectively, reports www.protectingdesigns.com (see table below). The proposed small and micro entities fees are, respectively, 50% and 25% of the large entity fees.

Fee Item	Current	Proposed	Percent Change
Filing Fee	$ 250	$ 260	4 %
Examination Fee	$ 160	$ 500	213 %
Search Fee	$ 120	$ 420	250 %
Issue Fee	$ 990	$ 1,020	3 %

 

Extension Fees	Current	Proposed	Percent Change
First Month	$ 150	$ 200	33 %
Second Month	$ 560	$ 600	7 %
Third Month	$ 1,270	$ 1,400	10 %
Fourth Month	$ 1,980	$ 2,200	11 %
Fifth Month	$ 2,690	$ 3,000	12 %

Meanwhile, on the good news front, the time to release a Notice of Intent to Issue a Reexamination Certificate (NIRC), has been cut from 120 days to 47 days, reports www.patentspostgrant.com. This is good news for patentees as amended/new claims do not legally exist until the certificate is printed. “In other words,” www.patentspostgrant.com reports, “potential infringement damages for such amended/new claims are lost to bureaucratic inefficiency (slow printing process) even though the substantive aspect of the reexamination proceeding is effectively finished.”