The USPTO will begin a program this year that allows applicants to request an appeal conference and learn the results before having to file an appeal brief. Currently, when applicants appeal rejections to the Board of Patent Appeals and Interferences (BPAI), they must file a Notice of Appeal and an appeal brief. The next step is an appeal conference. Statistics demonstrate that appeal conferences result in approximately 60% of cases being returned to the patent corps.
A Statutory Invention Registration (SIR) is not a patent. An inventor wishing to prevent others from obtaining a patent on their invention may request, at any time during the pendency of their complete application, that the specification and drawings be published as an SIR. Upon publication, the inventor waives all patent rights to the subject matter claimed in the statutory invention. The application to be published as an SIR must comply with 35 U.S.C. 112, and be complete as set forth in 37 CFR 1.51(b) including a specification with a claim or claims, an oath or declaration, and drawings when necessary. An SIR is a “constructive reduction to practice” under 35 U.S.C. 102(g) and “prior art” under all applicable sections of 35 U.S.C. 102 including section 102(e). SIRs are classified, cross-referenced, and placed in the search files, disseminated to foreign patent offices, stored in U.S. Patent and Trademark Office computer tapes, made available in commercial databases, and announced in the Official Gazette.
The USPTO announced that the University of California received 424 patents in 2004, ranking it number one among all universities. Caltech received 135, followed by MIT with 132.
The Invent Blog has an excellent guide to downloading patent copies on the Internet.
“It is therefore a primary object of the invention to provide a… kissing shield to be used when kissing mouth-to-mouth… thereby avoiding the necessity for skin contact with the person to whom affection is intended.” Isn’t skin contact the whole point? For more gems, including how the kissing shield can help prevent the spread of AIDS through kissing, read “Kissing shield and method of use thereof”, or any of these.
FreshPatents.com provides RSS feeds of newly published US patent applications. Feeds can be chosen based on industry (USPTO Class). A monitoring feature sends you email when an application containing user specified keywords is published.
Code Patents is offering an RSS newsfeed of software related patents granted by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The patents are evaluated by a human before being added to the feed so as to eliminate non-software type patents.
