About forty-six comments have been filed in response to USPTO’s recent notice of proposed rulemaking regarding patent fees. One of the comments is filed by “Seventy-three patent practitioners”. Here is the opening paragraph of their letter:
We write as patent practitioners to comment on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM), Setting and Adjusting Patent Fees During Fiscal Year 2020. The signatories are members of several email listserv groups, a community of patent practitioners. The signatories taken together filed about 20,000 patent applications at the PTO during the past ten years, and paid about $50 million in fees to the PTO in the past ten years.
I am honored to be among the signers of that letter.
On a quick skim, it appears that every comment to this NPRM (including the comment cited above) that touches in any way on the non-DOCX surcharge is critical of USPTO’s effort to try to force applicants to file patent applications in DOCX format through imposition of a $400 penalty for failure to do so.
In future blog articles I will try to excerpt and summarize some of the views expressed in the comments.
And thanks to you, Carl, for giving us ‘in the trenches’ patent folks a place (albeit electronic) to learn from each other & help each other — very much appreciated as a sole practitioner!