January 2008
U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: Patent Prosecution Highway Pilot Programs Announced for Canada and Korea
USPTO announced patent prosecution pilot programs with Canada and Korea, designed to allow applicants in member countries to obtain corresponding patents faster and more efficiently in each country.
U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: Implement Patent Prosecution Highway Full-Time with Japan
USPTO and the Japan Patent Office recently announced that they will "implement the Patent Prosecution Highway (PPH) on a full-time basis, beginning January 4, 2008 …[I]mplementation of the PPH is a cornerstone of the January 2007 cooperation initiative between the United States Department of Commerce and Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry on enhanced intellectual property rights protection. The initiative calls for the USPTO and the JPO to demonstrate leadership by taking a proactive approach to streamlining practices and procedures under the international patent system to promote expeditious, inexpensive and high-quality patent protection throughout the world. Under the PPH, an applicant receiving a ruling from either the JPO or the USPTO that at least one claim in an application is patentable may request that the other office fast track the examination of corresponding claims in corresponding applications. By basing the prosecution in the second office on patentable results from the first office, applicants can expect to obtain patents in both offices faster."
April 2007
US Patent and Trademark Office: Five Year Strategic Plan
Final USPTO five Year (2007-1012) Strategic Plan issued (see below).
August 2006
U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: Five Year Plan & Community Patent Review pilot
USPTO Draft Five Year Strategic Plan, 2007-2012 identifies optimizing "the quality and timeliness of the patent and trademark review process…" as top level goals. Further, it includes "develop[ing] a peer review mechanism in which public sector volunteer experts will review published applications and provide prior art," as a strategic initiative to "improve and enhance examination efficiency and effectiveness." To that end, the USPTO will participate in a pilot project, to be launched in 2007, which will allow just such a collaborative review of patent applications. The pilot, titled the CPR Project Summary (CPR - more details can be found at Peer to Patent Project), will allow outsiders to comment on patent applications during the patent review process, increasing (and in theory improving) the information patent examiners have available for making decisions. Companies that have already agreed to participate include General Electric, HP, IBM, Oracle, Intel, Microsoft, International Characters, Out of the Box Computing and Red Hat. (See Oct/Nov 2006 DC on T2)
