Month: March 2014

The USPTO has published proposed rules which would impose upon all patent applicants and upon all patent owners a new burden — an obligation to carry out recurring investigations as to “attributable owners” of patent applications and patents, and to report the list of “attributable owners” to the USPTO.  The proposed rules would subject each patent owner to the grave risk, at litigation time, that a court might deem the underlying patent application to have gone abandoned during its pendency before the USPTO due to a real or imagined error in the reported list of “attributable owners”.  The investigation and reporting burden would, for many corporations, add thousands or tens of thousands of dollars to the cost of prosecuting a US patent application.

Comments are due by April 24.  Any corporation that owns US patents should read the proposed rules and, I suggest, should file comments by the due date.  Likewise any patent practitioner that represents corporations before the USPTO should read the proposed rules and, I suggest, should file comments by the due date.  I have filed comments with the USPTO. Continue reading “File your comments by April 24 on proposed patent applicant filing burdens”