Reminder - A new fee schedule begins October 5, 2012 that raises patent fees by 0–3% depending upon the fee.  Thus, the issue fee for a utility patent is moving upward from $1,740 to $1,770, for example. This fee increase is designed to to account for inflation.

• Current Fees: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee092611.htm
• New Fees: http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/qs/ope/fee100512.htm

This is a relatively minor change in fees and the fee structure. A much more substantial change will be implemented in the coming months (likely early 2013) once the USPTO finalizes its rules on AIA fee implementation. At that time, the micro entity fee discount will also become effective.

The USPTO is struggling somewhat with how to implement preissuance submissions. 

Required Concise Description: The new provision created by the America Invents Act (AIA) opens the door for any third party to submit “any … printed publication potential relevance to the examination of the application” if submitted within the proper window following application publication.  35 U.S.C. 122(e)(1).  The preissuance submission must also include a “concise description of the asserted relevance of each submitted document.” 35 U.S.C. 122(e)(2)(A).

The senior managers at USPTO learned patent law in the days when patent prosecution was extremely ex parte. Before 2001, pending applications were not published and were instead kept in complete confidence within the USPTO.  File wrappers were only reviewed in paper copy form and patent law was not generally thought of as much of a public concern.  Those days are gone, but fragments of that history remain.

In 1999 the omnibus appropriations bill included American Inventors Protection Act of 1999.  The AIPA implemented a new program of publishing pending patent applications 18–months after filing.  Applicants still have the option of keeping their applications secret while pending. However, that option requires that the applicant forego non-US patent rights. As the chart shows below, the vast majority of applications are published prior to issuance.  Further, about half of the non-published applications are ones that issued within 18 months of filing.

The new publication system raised a concern that third parties would begin challenging patents before issuance. As part of the legislative compromise, the 1999 AIPA legislation also included a special provision that blocks preissuance protests and oppositions. The provision authorizes the USPTO Director to establish procedures to ensure that no pre-issuance opposition is initiated following publication.

Protest and Pre-Issuance Opposition.— The Director shall establish appropriate procedures to ensure that no protest or other form of pre-issuance opposition to the grant of a patent on an application may be initiated after publication of the application without the express written consent of the applicant.

35 U.S.C. 122(c). The USPTO recognizes that the new preissuance submission system is in tension with the rule against allowing pre-issuance oppositions. In its implementation regulations the USPTO attempts to provide some limitation on the submissions in order to avoid the conflict. In the explanation of the final rules, the USPTO writes:

The third party should present the concise description in a format that would best explain to the examiner the relevance of the accompanying document, such as in a narrative description or a claim chart. The statutory requirement for a concise description of relevance should not be interpreted as permitting a third party to participate in the prosecution of an application, as 35 U.S.C. 122(c) prohibits the initiation of a protest or other form of pre-issuance opposition for published applications without the consent of the applicant. Therefore, while a concise description of relevance may include claim charts (i.e., mapping various portions of a submitted document to different claim elements), the concise description of relevance is not an invitation to a third party to propose rejections of the claims or set forth arguments relating to an Office action in the application or to an applicant’s reply to an Office action in the application.

PreIssuance Final Rules (July 2012). In its discussion of the new rules, the USPTO also suggested that the concise description is “limited to a description of a document’s relevance” cannot include “arguments against patentability.”

Unlike the concise description of relevance required by 35 U.S.C. 122(e) for a preissuance submission, which is limited to a description of a document’s relevance, the concise explanation for a protest under 37 CFR 1.291 allows for arguments against patentability.

Clearly there is a limit here to the scope of the description that can be filed. However, the USPTO’s distinction between a description and explanation is not entirely clear. 

The USPTO’s approach here makes some sense but is somewhat misguided.  In my mind, the statutory mandated description of relevance seems to requires at least some indication the statutory hook.  This is especially true because the preissuance submissions are not limited to 102/103 related prior art submissions. Rather, the submissions merely need to be potentially relevant to examination.  The best interpretation of the statute is that the discription of relevance is a description of how the submitted document is relevant to the examination.  In my mind, this sets up a three way network and the required description should discuss how (1) the submitted document changes how we think about (2) the patent application based upon some (3) law or other element of patent examination.  In the context of a claim construction chart, the link to 102/103 will likely be implicitly understandable without discussing the statutory elements.  Explanations regarding claim construction, subject matter eligibility, indefiniteness, or other examination issues likely will not make sense unless at least those particular labels are provided in the explnation of how the document is relevant to the examination.

48–hours after opening its doors, the Patent Trial & Appeal Board has new business.  According to the USPTO, ten new requests for inter partes reviews have been filed in the first two days as well as three post-grant review requests of financial business method patents (“covered business methods”).  Interestingly, four of the requests were filed by the non-practising entity Intellectual Ventures against patents owned by Xilinix. U.S. Patent Nos. 7,566,960, 7994609, 8,058,897, and 8,062,968.  Patrick Anderson has more history regarding the IV versus Xilinix fight at his GametimeIP blog.

On September 16, 2012, the USPTO's new inter partes reviews system became effective.  These reviews involve a complete redesign of inter partes reexaminations that can no longer be filed.  The new post-grant review system allows for an expanded scope of challenges.  Generally, PGR will only be available to challenge patents issued under the new first-to-file rules of the AIA. However, under the AIA, the PGR system can currently be used to challenge financial business method patents that fit the description provided by the statute.

The three business method reviews each focus on subject matter eligibility of the business method claims. Liberty Mutual challenged two such patents, including the following claim from U.S. Patent No. 6,553,350.

17. A method for determining a price of a product offered to a purchasing organization comprising:

arranging a hierarchy of organizational groups comprising a plurality of branches such that an organizational group below a higher organizational group in each of the branches is a subset of the higher organizational group;

arranging a hierarchy of product groups comprising a plurality of branches such that a product group below a higher product group in each of the branches in a subset of the higher product group;

storing pricing information in a data source, wherein the pricing information is associated, with (i) a pricing type, (ii) the organizational groups, and (iii) the product groups;

retrieving applicable pricing information corresponding to the product, the purchasing organization, each product group above the product group in each branch of the hierarchy of product groups in which the product is a member, and each organizational group above the purchasing organization in each branch of the hierarchy of organizational groups in which the purchasing organization is a member;

sorting the pricing information according to the pricing types, the product, the purchasing organization, the hierarchy of product groups, and the hierarchy of organizational groups;

eliminating any of the pricing information that is less restrictive; and determining the product price using the sorted pricing information.

Most of the challenged patents are in the electronic, software, and business method market areas.  However, three patents stem from USPTO Technology Center 1600 (biochemistry and organic chemistry).

• Patent No. 6,258,540 (non-invasive prenatal diagnosis using maternal plasma owned by Oxford University (UK) Isis Innovation) challenged by Ariosa Diagnostic.
• Patent Nos. 7,713,698 and 7,790,869 (Columbia University patents on “massive parallel methods for decoding DNA and RNA”) challenged by Ilumina.

Other filers include Garmin Int'l (6,258,540); Nichia Corp. (6,653,215); and Macauto USA (6,422,291).

You can search the PTO post grant submissions here: https://ptabtrials.uspto.gov