Patents for Humanity is the USPTO’s top honor for innovators who use game-changing technology to meet global humanitarian challenges. Businesses and others are finding unique and creative ways to reach underserved markets. Their stories show that humanitarian engagement is compatible with business interests and strong patent rights, and that companies can effectively contribute to global good while maintaining commercial markets. Patents for Humanity submissions are evaluated on the effectiveness of their technology at addressing a humanitarian issue, on the contributions made by applicants to increase use of their technology among the impoverished, and on the impact those contributions have made to improve lives.

Read the remarks by Deputy Director Russ Slifer.

What we all know is that IP is increasingly important to the success of our economies. That is perhaps best illustrated in a major study on the economic impact of IP intensive industries that was just published by the USPTO in collaboration with our DOC colleagues at the Economics and Statistics Administration. This report found that IP-intensive industries directly and indirectly supported more than 45 million jobs in 2014, or nearly 1/3 of all U.S. jobs. These findings parallel the recently released joint EPO and EUIPO study that found that approximately 38% of all employment in EU stems from businesses that have a higher than average use of IP rights. So, whether you’re in D.C., or London, or anywhere in between or beyond, IP remains a vital driver of economic growth. And that is why I believe the incoming administration must and will continue our effort to promote innovation fueled by a strong and robust IP system. Support for IP in the United States has a long history of bipartisanship, and there’s no reason to imagine that changing with a new president and a new Congress, both of whom have economic growth as a top priority.

Read the remarks by Director Michelle K. Lee.

As many of you know, we’ve already spent a fair amount of effort on this issue in recent years. Following major court rulings, we’ve revised our examination guidance, with input from our stakeholders, multiple times and trained our examiners on the new guidance. For example, several Supreme Court decisions in the last few years reminded us of the role the judicial exceptions doctrine plays in determining subject matter eligibility. That includes the Myriad and Mayo cases, each of which concerns the eligibility of naturally occurring things, and Alice, which concerns the eligibility of computer-implemented inventions. Alice and Mayo also set forth a test for evaluating the subject matter eligibility of patent claims.

As a result of these cases, we provided our examiners guidance that allows them to conduct complete and thorough examinations of subject matter eligibility in accordance with the current state of the law. In December 2014, we issued eligibility guidance that resulted from many months of careful deliberation, including analysis of the Supreme Court decisions and the feedback we received from our stakeholders on the pertinent law and our pre-Alice guidance. We also held a public forum like today’s event and solicited written comments, which we used to further refine our guidance in July 2015 and again in May of this year. And we continued to respond to the developing case law.

Read the remarks by Director Michelle K. Lee.

U.S. companies may understand how to handle their intellectual property (IP) interests within the United States, but selling products and being competitive in foreign markets with varied and unfamiliar local IP laws is a different ball game. Independent inventors and small and medium-sized entities may lack the in-house resources and expertise they need to deal with foreign IP regulations.

And today, looking after those IP assets is more important than ever: according to a recent estimate from the International Chamber of Commerce, the global value of counterfeit and pirated products could be as high as $1.8 trillion a year. This represents a huge loss of revenue.

Read the blog by The Department of Commerce.

As part of the USPTO’s ongoing Enhanced Patent Quality Initiative, in April 2016 we launched the Post Grant Outcomes Pilot, focused on pending patent applications that are related to issued patents undergoing an America Invents Act (AIA) trial proceeding before the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). We’d like to report that the Post Grant Outcomes Pilot has succeeded in making examiners aware of patents related to applications they are examining that are involved in PTAB trials, and in turn has facilitated the timely and effective examination of applications.

AIA trial proceedings contain prior art and arguments that might be highly relevant to the patentability determination of related applications currently under examination. This pilot was intended to help examiners harness the art presented during AIA trials to enhance examination of a related application, so they could reach more expeditious decisions on patentability.

Read the blog by Chief Judge for the Patent and Trial Appeal Board David Ruschke and Commissioner for Patents Drew Hirshfeld.

The USPTO is committed to issuing the highest quality patents possible, as evidenced by our Enhanced Patent Quality Initiative (EPQI). An important part of this effort is evaluating our patent examination time goals with the help of the public.

Examination time goals, which vary by technology, represent the average amount of time a patent examiner is expected to spend examining an application. Because examination time goals impact both patent pendency and quality, we want to ensure that our examination time goals accurately reflect the amount of time needed by examiners to conduct quality examination. A critical part of our efforts is obtaining stakeholder input. 

Read the blog by Deputy Director Russ Slifer.

Improving the way the government delivers information technology (IT) solutions to its customers isn’t just a goal, it’s our mission. We at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office know that by publishing our open source code, the public can help us come up with new and better IT solutions. In advance of the new Federal Source Code Policy and in support of the Administration’s Open Government Initiative, we have been publishing content on Github for over a year, and it now includes source code for a mobile application for trademarks.

The new published source code on Github is for a sample application enabling a user to access and track the status of a trademark. This application enables the user to receive a push notification anytime the status of a trademark application changes. The idea for this app began with feedback from the leadership in Trademarks, and we believe that it will also be a useful tool for our own employees. We’re making our code for this application open to the public, so you can also use it in your own projects, improve it so it works best for you, or create an entirely new application. 

Read the blog by Chief Technology Officer David Chiles.

“Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” Thomas Jefferson once wrote.

In the United States that price has been paid by generations of veterans at home and abroad, in peacetime and war – selfless citizens who have sacrificed their time, comfort, and even their lives in defense of our nation and our allies.

At the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) today, we are privileged to have many such veterans among us. Some have served in places like Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans, and Vietnam. Some are serving still, in the reserves, attending monthly drills and annual training and deploying into harm’s way when needed.

also use it in your own projects, improve it so it works best for you, or create an entirely new application. 

Read the blog by Chief Administrative Officer Fred Steckler.

Standing on stage this past Friday, inventors from colleges and universities across the country were recognized for their work developing cutting-edge inventions, at the 2016 Collegiate Inventors Competition (CIC) at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) in Alexandria, VA. Through CIC, the skills that these students have gained both through the process of invention and by learning about intellectual property will be an asset to them as they decide on their next steps, which could be further research or commercializing their invention. “The ideas represented in this room—and the bright minds behind them—are the present and future of America innovation,” said Drew Hirshfeld, Commissioner for Patents at the USPTO.

The 28 undergraduate and graduate students all had the chance to interact one-on-one with inductees of the National Inventors Hall of Fame (NIHF). These established inventors – who have invented many tools, processes, or devices that are now commonplace in our lives, such as the digital camera, microprocessor, electret microphone, and the implantable defibrillator – served as judges for the competition and provided advice and inspiration for the students. USPTO officials and AbbVie Foundation scientists also served as judges.

Read the blog by The Department of Commerce.

I’m pleased to report that we have completed the Clarity of the Record Pilot launched earlier this year as part of our Enhanced Patent Quality Initiative. We’ve achieved our goal of identifying some best practices for enhancing the clarity of various aspects of the prosecution record. These include best practices for documenting the USPTO’s positions with respect to claim interpretation, reasons for allowance, and interview summaries as well as encouraging examiners to initiate pre-search interviews when needed to gain a better understanding of the claimed invention. I would like to fill you in on some of our findings, and also encourage you to attend our day-long patent quality conference on December 13, where we will report in detail on the progress of the dozen or so programs in the Enhanced Patent Quality Initiative.

Read the blog by Director Michelle K. Lee. 

As the year comes to a close, it is a perfect time to reflect on our current successes, and challenge ourselves to continually improve our information technology (IT) systems. As the Chief Information Officer, I am focused on driving innovation at the USPTO while protecting our nation’s cutting edge ideas.

The Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) works hard every day to make sure both our existing systems and our new “next generation” systems enable examiners to accomplish their important work. We are building excellent tools for the public while we drive to fine-tune our own processes for greater efficiency. Supported by more robust, updated IT systems and tools, USPTO examiners will be able to leverage these tools, and new data, to issue the best quality patents and trademarks. When we improve systems and services for our examiners, the public benefits as well.

Read the blog by Chief Information Officer John Owens II.

The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (TTAB) announced the culmination of an in-depth outreach effort to stakeholders focused on enhancing the Board’s appeal and trial processes. In a Notice of Final Rule-Making (NFRM), published in the Federal Register on October 7, 2016, the USPTO said new rule changes will benefit the public by providing more clarity in the rules, flexibility for parties involved in Board proceedings, and increased procedural efficiency. At the same time, the rules further a USPTO strategic objective to increase end-to-end electronic processing of trademark matters, which reduce costs to the USPTO and the public, and helps avoid errors that may creep into records during manual entry of data contained in paper filings.

The last major set of TTAB rule changes took effect in 2007. Since then, there have been case law developments, changes in the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure, and the rollout of the USPTO’s Accelerated Case Resolution (ACR) process. Therefore, it is an ideal time to update the rules to make the benefits of ACR available to all parties, as well as to promote electronic filing and communication. The rule changes, major provisions of which are summarized below, reflect significant input from the Trademark Public Advisory Committee, individual stakeholders, and professional associations, and have been well-received since publication in the Federal Register.

Read the blog by Chief Administrative Trademark Judge Gerard F. Rogers.

Over the past six years, the U.S. Supreme Court has issued a series of decisions—Bilski, Mayo, Myriad, and Alice—that have significantly impacted patent eligibility law and continue to generate substantial public debate. The USPTO sought input from the public on patent subject-matter eligibility through the first of two roundtables November 14 in Alexandria, Virginia.

This first roundtable focused on soliciting stakeholder views on ways of improving the USPTO’s subject-matter eligibility guidance for patent examiners and how that guidance is being applied by examiners. Additional details about the roundtables are in a Federal Register Notice published October 17, 2016.

To learn more, watch the archived video.

The Deputy Commissioner for Patent Quality held the twelfth Patent Quality Chat in the 2016 webinar series on Tuesday, November 8th on our Clarity of the Record Pilot. Director of Technology Center 2800 Robin Evans and Acting Director of the Office of Patent Quality Assurance Marty Rater discussed the construction of the pilot and our findings. We invite all attendees to listen in and provide your feedback on what we have identified as key drivers of patent quality. Improving the clarity of the patent prosecution record is an important step toward enhancing our Excellence in Work Products as a part of the Enhanced Patent Quality Initiative (EPQI) and maintaining high patent quality moving forward.

Patent Quality Chat is a monthly, lunchtime webinar series designed to provide information on patent quality topics and gather your input. The last Patent Quality Chat of 2016 will be held on December 13 and will be a special engagement on advancing patent quality across the IP community, featuring Director Michelle K. Lee.

To learn more about the November Patent Quality Chat, watch the archived video or view the presentation slides.

The Collegiate Inventors Competition, a program of the National Inventors Hall of Fame in partnership with the USPTO, is an annual competition that rewards innovations, discoveries, and research by college and university students and their faculty advisors. The 2016 finalists and their inventions provided a glimpse into the future of American innovation and emerging technological trends, from advanced crop harvesting techniques to medical breakthroughs designed to help people in low- to middle-income countries.

Eleven competition finalists showcased their inventions and interacted with thousands of USPTO patent and trademark examiners, sponsors, media, and the public at the Collegiate Inventors Competition Expo.

To learn more about the finalists, visit the Collegiate Inventors Competition website. 

The quarterly Patent Public Advisory Committee (PPAC) meeting was held on November 3 at USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia. The PPAC reviews the policies, goals, performance, budget, and user fees of patent operations and advises the Director on these matters.

To learn more, view the agenda and download the presentation slides.

“Director Lee: IP is a Necessary Key Piece of President-Elect Trump’s Promised Economic Growth and Job Creation”
Dennis Crouch, Patently-O

“WHAT CAN THE US PATENT & TRADE OFFICE DO FOR YOUR STARTUP? STARTUP GRIND DC FIRESIDE CHAT WITH MICHELLE K. LEE”
Vanessa Wagner, Startup Grind

“Edward Elliott: USPTO hands out Patents for Humanity awards”
Tom Temin, Federal News Radio

“Visionary Veterans Exhibit in Alexandria”
Jeanne Theismann, Alexandria Gazette Packet

“Could These College Inventors Tackle the Global Pesticide Problem?”
Maya Wei-Haas, Smithsonian Magazine