Fees Soar 47% in Plan to Cut U.S. Patent Backlog B
By Susan Decker
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Feb. 15 (Bloomberg) -- Large companies would pay 47 percent more to seek a patent under a plan to reduce a backlog of applications at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by almost half within four years.
The BGOV Barometer shows the number of applications awaiting review, projected at 621,800 this year, would be reduced to 329,500 by the end of 2015, under the agency’s plan to use increased fee revenue to hire more examiners. Without the additional reviewers, the 2015 backlog would be 444 Herve Leger,200, according to patent office projections.
“There’s no free lunch, and no free patent process either,” Mark Chandler, general counsel for Cisco Systems Inc., said in a blog posting in support of the fee adjustments.
An efficient patent office “is vital to speedy review of patents applied for by companies like Cisco, to weeding out applications that shouldn’t result in patents, and reviewing issued patents to make sure they’re not defective,” Chandler said.
The added fees would be on top of a 15 percent surcharge that went into effect with an overhaul of the U.S. patent system in September. The changes would add almost $400 million to patent office revenue in 2013, allowing the agency to cover expenses plus put money in an operating reserve that can be tapped if there’s a drop in applications.
The patent office was given the authority to set its own fees under the legislation signed last year by President Barack Obama. The proposal gets its first public hearing today before the Public Patent Advisory Committee, an independent board that advises the agency on policy issues. If all goes as scheduled, the changes would take effect in February 2013, said Janet Gongola, the agency’s coordinator for implementing provisions of the law.
The fee increase will allow the agency to “launch a full court press to overwhelm the backlog of unexamined patent applications as quickly and responsibly as possible,” David Kappos, director of the patent office, said in a Feb. 7 letter to the advisory committee.
Fees are set based on the size of a patent applicant’s business. Large companies, typically those with more than 500 employees, currently pay $1,250 to cover the costs of filing and examination of an application, and that figure would jump to $1,840.
Changes will affect almost all the fees that cover every step of the application process as well as maintenance fees for the life of a patent. Many fees will increase, while some will go down, and the legislation created a new group covering some independent inventors and small companies that would qualify for a 75 percent reduction in their costs.
The patent office plans to hire at least 1,500 new examiners above its current 6,650 and proceed with a $2.25 billion effort to rebuild its computer and financial systems, programs that have been slowed because of funding problems at the agency.
Obama called for increasing the agency’s budget 9 percent to $2.95 billion in fiscal 2013 under the administration’s budget proposal released Feb. 13. The patent office, which is funded exclusively through user fees, would be able to keep all the money it collects under the legislation signed last year. Previously, Congress was able to shift patent revenue to other purposes and diverted about $1 billion over the last 20 years.
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--Editors: Mark Rohner, Michael Shepard
-0- Feb/16/2012 19:26 GMT
To contact the reporter on this story: Susan Decker in Washington at sdecker1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Michael Shepard at mshepard7@bloomberg.net
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