U.S. Patent 7,000,000 on Feb. 14?

If the USPTO issues 3,155 or more utility patents next Tuesday, Feb. 14, it is likely that they will include patent number 7,000,000. The UPSTO issued 3,040 utility patents on Feb. 7. The highest numbered utility patent is currently 6,996,845. Given the timing, one has to wonder what the subject of the milestone patent will be...

Perhaps a new formulation for fat-free chocolate? A method of identifying potential mates on-line? A recordable Valentine's Day card with a built-in video display and speakers?

Patent No. 6,000,000 was granted on December 7, 1999 to inventors Jeff Hawkins and Michael Albanese. Their invention was a system for synchronizing files on two computers, the core technology of the Palm Pilot PDA, the first commercially successful hand-held electronic organizer. Other million-milestone patents include:

5,000,000 (March 19, 1991)
Ethanol production by Escherichia coli strains co-expressing Zymomonas PDC and ADH genes

4,000,000 (Decembre 28, 1976)
Process for recycling asphalt-aggregate compositions

3,000,000 (September 12, 1961)
Automatic reading system (barcodes)

2,000,000 (April 30, 1935)
Vehicle wheel construction

1,000,000 (August 8, 1911)
Vehicle tire

Chinese Universities Increase Patent Filings

There have been many articles and opinion pieces in American business and engineering magazines in recent months warning of the threat of China overtaking the U.S. in technical education and innovation. A recent issue of ASEE Prism, the magazine of the American Society for Engineering Education, concludes that China is in the process of creating world-class engineering universities. One of the keynote speakers at ASEE's 2005 annual conference, Dwight Streit, VP of Foundation Technologies for Northrup-Grumman, warned that China is graduating some 325,000 new engineers per year compared to 70,000 in the U.S. A recent BusinessWeek article noted that Indian engineering firms are poised to capture more U.S. engineering and design work. It concludes that U.S. engineers need to be redeployed to higher-valued jobs.

Chinese universities are also making impressive progress in the realm of intellectual property. According to an article in the June issue of KnowledgeLink (Thomson Scientific), Chinese university patent activity is increasing at a faster rate than scholarly publications, a frequently cited measure of academic research output, because of intellectual property law reform and government policies encouraging domestic research and commercialziation. According to the 2004 annual report of China's State Intellectual Property Office, Chinese universities and research institutes accounted for 17 percent of the approximately 111,000 new patent applications filed in 2004. Tsinghua University accounted for 875 new patent applications alone, followed by Shanghai Jiaotong University with 829 and Zhejiang University with 762. In comparison, the University of California (all campuses) filed 424 new patent applications with the USPTO in 2004, followed by Cal Tech with 135, and MIT with 132, in 2004. The World Intellectual Property Organization reported recently that Chinese PCT filings increased by 43.7 percent in 2005.

USPTO Keeps Fees in President's 2007 Budget

President Bush's budget proposal for fiscal year 2007 recommends that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office keep all of the roughly $1.8 billion it collects in patent and trademark fees and supports additional increases for reducing application processing times and improving quality.

Inventors and intellectual property owners have long complained of Congress's habit of diverting USPTO fees to fund other federal programs. Funding for the USPTO, an agency of the Department of Commerce, is covered in the bill authorizing the budgets of the Departments of Commerce, State and Justice. President Bush has supported ending the practice of diversion in recent budget proposals.

The USTO will need access to all its funds in order to decrease its increasing backlog of patent applications and support e-government initiatives. Last year the USPTO hired some 970 patent examiners and received more than 400,000 new patent applications. The USPTO expects to hire approximately 1,000 more examiners per year throught fiscal year 2011, according to testimony before Congress by Jon Dudas, Undersecretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property and Director of the USPTO. The number of pending patent applications could increase from approximately 600,000 today to 1,000,000 by 2010, according to Dudas.

The USPTO has a mixed record on implementing technological solutions to its workload problem. The USPTO's award-winning Trademark Electronic Application System (TEAS), lauched in October, 1998 and its Trademark Electronic Search Search (TESS) have been very successful. More than 88 percent of new trademark applications are filed electronically, according to the USPTO's 2005 annual report. TESS includes all registered and pending trademark applications and expired trademarks since 1984. The USPTO's patent electronic filing system, EFS, despite significant investment, has not been successful. Less than 2 percent of new patent applications are filed electronically. Inventors and patent attorneys have complained of the system's difficult user interface, complexity and reliability. According to the annual report, a new, web-based version of EFS should be in full production mode by the end of 2006.

According to a report in Federal Computer Week, the USPTO plans to use much of the fiscal year budget authority to hire more patent and trademark examiners, and improve examiner traininng. The report also stated that the USPTO would budget $70.2 million to improve its patent automation system and an additional $18.2 million to enhance its trademark automation system. $10.1 million will be allocated for improvements to the USPTO's web-based information dissemination management system.

Japan, China, S. Korea Lead PCT Filings in 2005

The World Intellectual Property organization has reported a record 134,000 international patent application filings in 2005. China and the Republic of Korea were the countries with the largest increases in PCT filings, jumping to the 10th and 6th positions, respectively. Japan had the third largest growth in PCT filings. Together, the three Asian countries accounted for 24.1 precent of all international applications. In comparison, PCT filings from Canada numbered 2,315 and the United States 45,111.

U.S. Patent Counts, Jan. 22-Feb. 2

The number of patents granted by the USPTO increased in the final week of January, jumping from about 2,500 on January 24 to 3,500 on January 31. This is one of only a few weeks since September 2005 that the USPTO has granted more than 3,000 patents in one week. Prior to October 1, 2005 the USPTO regularly granted 3,000-3,500 patents per week. The number of published applications increased slightly to 5,500.

U.S. Patent Counts, Jan. 1-Jan 21

In the first three weeks of 2006 the USPTO published 15,973 applications and issued 7,315 patents. This is a drop of about 2,000 patents from the same period a year ago. The number of published applications in the first three weeks of 2005 was 15,830. Based on preliminary data from the USPTO web site.

Vatican to Publishers: Papal Writings Owed Royalties

According to a recent article in the London Times, the Vatican has implemented a new, strict copyright policy on the writings of Pope Benedict XVI and his predecessors going back fifty years. This includes the writings of John Paul II, John Paul I, Paul VI and John XXIII. Official copyrights on all papal documents will be assigned to the Vatican publishing house, the Libreria Editrice Vaticana. Publishers who wish to republish papal writings will be asked to pay a 3-5 percent copyright fee. Those who infringe papal copyrights face a 15 percent fee.

Vatican Cashes In by Putting Price on the Pope's Copyright, The Times, Jan. 23.

USPTO Warns Inventors About ID Theft

According to an article in the Washington Times on Jan. 20, the USPTO is warning inventors not to put sensitive information such as Social Security and bank account numbers on patent applications and related documents, lest it be used to commit identity fraud. Each week thousands of patent application files become available to the public on the USPTO web site. (Applications are published 18 months after the earliest filing date or when a patent issues.) The USPTO implemented a new policy on Oct. 1, 2005 by which it reserved the right to remove such information if inventors include it. An agency spokesman said that there were no known cases of inventor identity theft.

This is not the first time that the dissemination of patent information has been linked to potential inventor fraud. It's interesting to note that in March 1874, just a few years after the Patent Office began publishing a weekly gazette containing abstracts (and inventor information) of newly issued patents, the Scientific American reported that inventors were receiving unsolicited letters from companies offering large sums to purchase their inventions provided they send a small sum ($5) to pay for an evaluation of their patent rights. Of course, few inventors received replies after sending in their money. Copies of the gazette were distributed to public libraries and private subscribers nationwide. Did this make it easier for unscrupulous patent agents and swindlers to contact potential victims?

Inventors Warned of ID Theft, Washington Times, Jan. 20, 2006.

New USPTO Class Order: Design Classes D9, D23, D32

The USPTO has released Classification Order 1853, covering classification changes to design classes:

D9 - Packages and containers for goods
D23 - Environmental heating and cooling; fluid handling and sanitary equipment
D32 - Washing, clearning, or drying machine

The classification order includes new schedules, established and abolished subclasses, definition changes and changes to the USPC--Locarno Classification Concordance. The Lorcano Classification is the international classification system for industrial designs. It is administered by the World Intellectual Property Organization and used by 43 countries.

New Nanotechnology Classifications

The EPO has announced a new ECLA section, Y01N, for nanotechnology-related patents. The new section has not yet been added to the esp@cenet classification search, but the schedule is available on the espacenet online forum and Y01N codes are searchable in esp@cenet.

Last year the USPTO also published a cross-reference art class for nanotechnology called Class 977.

EPO 2005 Far East Meets West: Patent Information from Japan and the Far East

Presentations and other materials from the EPO's 2005 Far East Meets West: Patent Information from Japan and the Far East conference is now available on the EPO's web site.

Topics include searching Japanese, Chinese and Korean patent documents, implementation of IPC8, patent information systems, patent law updates and legal status research.

EPO Implements IPC8

The EPO has published new guideliness for searching IPC codes under IPC8, which went into force on Jan. 1. IPC8 is divided into "Core" and "Advanced" levels. The Core level will be updated every three years; the Advanced level is a dynamic system that will be continuously updated every three months or less. There are also new rules governing the assignment of IPC8 codes to invention and non-invention information disclosed in an application.

The EPO has made it possible to search IPC8 codes in esp@cenet using the following options:

• ci: selects IPC Core Invention
• cn: selects IPC Core Non Invention
• ai: selects IPC Advanced Invention
• an: selects IPC Advanced Non Invention
• c: selects IPC Core
• a: selects IPC Advanced

RSS Feeds Make Patent Watching a Breeze

If you're a patent news hound like me, you`re probably in the habit of visiting 3-6 patent office web sites a week looking for the latest official press releases, notices and announcements. Of course, all of that clicking and typing gets old fast. Fortunately, some innovative patent information professionals and attorneys are using RSS technology to streamline the process of reading patent office news.

Two of my favourite patent RSS sites are IPNewsFlash and Rethink(IP). IPNewsflash provides feeds of official notices from the USPTO, JPO, EPO, WIPO, UK, German Patent Office and the Office for Harmonization in the Internal Market (OHIM), the EU agency that administers the Community Trade Mark and Community Design programs. Rethink(IP), a service created by patent attorneys Stephen Nipper, J. Matthew Buchanan and Douglas Sorocco, provides feeds for USPTO notices and press releases, and recently filed patent lawsuits.

The USPTO has been publishing a weekly gazette of abstracts of newly issued patents since 1872. In 2002, the USPTO made a great leap backward to 1990 by moving the Official Gazette (OG) from print to CD-ROM format. (To be fair, the USPTO also publishes the most recent 52 weeks of the OG on its web site.) The new version was called eOG:P, a name which combined the worst of the recent Dot Com boom with the federal government`s love of mind-bending acronyms.

Fortunately, two patent information services, Paterra, Inc. and FreePatentsOnline, now provide RSS feeds of recently issued U.S. patents and published applications. The Paterra feeds display a list of the most recent titles with publication dates and the name of the principal inventor. FreePatentsOnline gives title and a link to the full text document stored in FPO`s online database. Both services are free.

Weekly Patent Counts for Dec. 18-31

The USPTO issued 2,512 patents and published 5,059 applications the week of December 18 and issued 3,049 patents and published 5,796 applications the week of December 25, the final week of 2005.* The sharp drop in the number of issued patents that began on October 1 continued throughout the fall; only 33,637 patents were issued in the fourth quarter, a 19 percent drop from the third quarter. The number of published applications was relatively stable; the total for the fourth quarter was 72,651, a .5 percent increase over the previous quarter.

*Based on preliminary data from the USPTO web site.

USPTO Union President Retires

Stephen Barr's recent column in the Washington Post (Dec. 21) noted the retirement of Ronald J. Stern, president of the Patent Office Professional Association (POPA), the union representing patent examiners and other USPTO professional staff, including librarians. Stern worked as a patent examiner for 41 years and served as POPA president for the past 23 years.

What does this have to do with patent information? Good question. Well, under Stern's leadership, POPA exercised significant influence on the development of patent information systems. For example, in 2001 POPA and the USPTO brokered a deal that gave patent examiners a significant salary increase (10-15%) in exchange for giving up paper search files, a goal of USPTO management since the 1980s. This allowed the USPTO to more forward with its implementation of the Image File Wrapper (IFW) system. Today, the web-based IFW contains scanned images of documents in hundreds of thousands of patent applications filed from June 30, 2003 to the present. (Utility and plant applications are eligible, with some exceptions, for publication 18-months after the earliest filing date.) In addition, public users can use IFW to access provisional applications and reexamination proceedings.

The deal with POPA also allowed the USPTO to move forward with its plans to convert its Public Search Facility (PSF) into an electronic research center. The USPTO removed more than 26 miles of linear shelf-space of paper patent documents before relocating the PSF from Crystal City to its new campus in Alexandria.

USPTO Website Satisfaction Trails E-Gov Rankings

The December quarterly report of the E-Government American Customer Satisfaction Index (E-Gov ACSI), an independent survey that measures customer satisfaction with Federal government websites, shows that overall customer satisfaction with government websites has risen from 72.1 a year ago to 73.9 today, a 2.5% increase. About 50 Federal government websites participate in the survey, which was established in 2003.

The USPTO website scored 67, a 1 point increase over a year ago and one of the lowest scores in the category "Portals/Department Main Sites." The USPTO has participated in the survey since December 2003, and its score has fluctuated between 66-68. The National Library of Medicine's MedlinePlus health information website scored 85, one of the highest scores among Federal government websites.

USPTO Website E-Gov ACSI Scores

2004 2005
Q1 66 66
Q2 66 68
Q3 66 66
Q4 66 67

Experts attribute the overall rise to improvements in governmentweb site navigation and search functions. The lack of improvement in the USPTO's score is puzzling, given the rationale (and cost) of the survey. In comparison, the General Services Administration website's score improved 12 points over a year ago following a major overhaul and redesign in 2005.

Sources

American Customer Satisfaction Index

Citizens Warm to Fed Web Sites , Dec. 15, 2005
Federal Computer Week

Weekly Patent/PGPub Counts

U.S. Patents and Published Applications
Week of December 12, 2005

Patents Issued = 2,873*
Published Applications = 4,914*

 Patents  PGPubs  Total
Q1  40,563  71,889  112,452
Q2  41,926  72,776  114,702
Q3  41,693  72,298  113,991
Q4  28,076  61,796  89,872 (to Dec. 15)
Year 152,258  278,759  431,017

There has been a large drop in the number of issued patents since October 1. From January to September, the weekly average of issued patents was 3,184. From October 1 to December 15, the weekly average is 2,552, a drop of about 20 percent. Published applications, on the other hand, have increased slightly over the course of the year. The weekly average of PGPubs from January to September was 5,563. From October 1 to December 15 it was 5,618.

Is the drop in the number of issued patents connected to the USPTO's changing workforce? Perhaps. The USPTO has hired 970 patent examiners this year. Undoubtably, the challenge of integrating and training such a large group (almost 25% of the total examing corps) must be pulling resources away from other activities.

*Based on preliminary data from the USPTO web site.

USPTO Expanding Training Facilities at Expense of Public Search Facilities

Less than 18 months after opening, the new USPTO Public Search Facility (PSF) and Scientific and Technical Information Center (STIC) are being reconfigured in order to accomodate two new USPTO training initiatives scheduled to start in early 2006.

According to the transcript of the November 16 public user's meeting held by the Office of Public Records and Office of Public Information Services, the second floor of the PSF, which opened in September 2004, will be transformed into training space for the new IP Global Academy (IPGA), an IP law program for foreign judges, law enforcement officials, and government officials. The number of public research workstations will be reduced from 308 to 237, more than enough to accomodate peak usage according to officials at the meeting. In addition, bound volumes of patents in numeric order will be moved to a storage space in Suitland, Maryland.

STIC will lose space to SEED, the School for Examiner Education and Development, a new patent examiner training program described by USPTO Director Jon W. Dudas as "collegial and collaborative." Training is a critical priority due to the rapid expansion of the USPTO's patent examiner workforce and growing application backlog. The USPTO hired approximately 970 examiners this year and plans on hiring 1,000 more per fiscal year to 2011, according to Dudas' Sept. 8 statement to the House Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet, and Intellectual Property. There are currently approximately 4,200 patent examiners. More than 400,000 new applications were filed in fiscal year 2005.

espacenet: 65K users/ 11 million page downloads per week

The European Patent Office announced that in the first half of 2005 the number of unique users accessing esp@cenet per week reached 65,000; more than 11 million PDF page downloads per week was also recorded during the same time period.

Recent improvements to espacenet include the addition of a new classification tag for nanotechnology, Y01N, and changing the Number Search to allow users to enter numbers without using a country code. For example, entering the number "6000000" will retrieve US6000000 and AU6000000.

esp@cenet

UM Researchers Tackle Patent Information

A team of researchers at the University of Michigan's School of Information are working with IBM scientists to develop new tools for searching and analyzing patent data. The NSF-funded project will use natural language search technology developed at the IBM Almaden Research Center, where the Free Patent Server was launched in 1997. IBM renamed the service the Intellectual Property Network (IPN) and then Delphion IPN, before selling it to Thomson.

While the press release describes the project as benefitting "individuals and businesses of all sizes," the project description emphasizes the development of new tools to help businesses identify "patent thickets... dense webs of overlapping patent rights that an organization must hack its way through in order to commercialize new technology." Certainly, this will be of most interest to companies in patent-intensive industries such as biotech, pharma/chemical and IT. It's unclear what impact it will have on independent inventors and small and medium-sized entreprises.

UMich SI Press Release
Project Description