The Patent and Trademark Office has two statutorily defined duties: To grant, issue, and register; and to disseminate information to the public. Confusion surrounding yesterday’s closing/non-closing of the Office shows, again, that PTO officials often forget about, and perhaps even ignore, the latter.

The Office of Personnel Management is reporting that all federal agencies in the Washington, D.C. area will be closed tomorrow, December 21. There is no reason to expect that this won’t apply to the Patent and Trademark Office.

Adjust your Christmas week work schedule accordingly.

The Patent and Trademark Office faced a cash crunch in fiscal year 2009. Fee collections were significantly lower than expected, and several drastic cost-cutting measures had to be implemented toward the end of the year. The annual report seems to suggest, though, that the Office left $118M on the table, presumably exposed to Congress for diversion.

Remember the USPTO proposal that would require patent practitioners to pay an annual fee to maintain their license? The Office officially abandoned the fee for 2009, leaving the future of the fee in limbo. A Federal Register Notice, published on Friday, makes a tangential mention of the fee….suggesting that it might be required in the near future.

Picking a candidate for the Under Secretary for IP/Director of the Patent and Trademark Office in this time of turmoil seems an impossible task. There is no shortage of candidates with academic and professional qualifications that are beyond question. But, at this critical time, the Office and the patent community desperately need a Director that brings more than merely the right resume.

Both Dennis Crouch and Stephen Albainy-Jenei have posted excellent summaries of the Tafas v. Doll case. If you’re looking for more information on this complex case – and the uncertain future of the proposed rules that would limit continuations, Requests for Continued Examination, and claims – be sure to check out both the Patent Baristas post and the PatentlyO post.

Over the next several weeks, we’re likely to see introduction of new patent reform legislation in the House and Senate, appointment of a new Director of the Patent and Trademark Office, and a decision from the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit on the controversial proposed continuation rules. Who says patent law is boring, stuffy, and uneventful?

Welcome to 2009!

For the first post of the New Year, I thought I’d break tradition a bit. Instead of looking forward and listing all the things I’m hoping for in 2009, I’ve decided to look backward and commemorate an anniversary.

Most outgoing Presidential administrations push through a few regulations in the final weeks of their tenure in a last ditch effort to exert their influence on federal law. We had reason to believe the Bush administration was different, though – way back in May, Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten issued instructions that final versions of such last ditch regulations should be issued no later than November 1, 2008.The Bolten memo is apparently set to be ignored, though.

In the surprise final rule that gave birth to the new (and terribly-named) Practitioner Maintenance Fee, the Patent and Trademark Office promised us that the fees it collects through the new rule won’t be diverted for other purposes. The Office can’t rightfully make this promise, though, as long as a permanent fix to fee diversion remains a dream.