USPTO, AUTM join forces to educate examiners

So USPTO examiners have the very best knowledge possible about the technologies universities are working on to submit for patent consideration, the USPTO and AUTM announced a new program whereby AUTM will provide technical speakers to speak with USPTO examiners wherever and whenever they want, David Kappos, head of the USPTO announced at the plenary session of the AUTM annual meeting on March 15.

“AUTM will work with us to provide the technical experts who can speak to these groups of USPTO examiners about areas of technology they want our team to know about,” Kappos said.

“It’s all upside: universities get the opportunity to share the state of the art; our examiners get smarter about the state of the art,” he continued.  Kappos encouraged university officials speaking to the examiners, be they professors, investigators, post grad students, to use copies of documents they wish to share with USPTO examiners. USPTO hopes to reach out to every single one of its current 7,000 examiners at least once per quarter with technical education.