Promote the Progress

Since launching our innovative FirstPage Reports(tm) on PatentFizz a couple weeks ago, we've received some wonderful feedback from our customers. Many have told us that the Reports are scratching an itch they've had for awhile - the need for an easy to generate overview document for their patent projects. Customers are using the Reports on everything from patent searches and clearance investigations to due diligence reviews and patent intelligence systems.

Now I'd like to extend a special offer to Promote the Progress readers on a new service based on FirstPage Reports.

Soon, we'll announce our new FirstPage Weekly(tm) service that will generate and deliver a FirstPage Report based on a customer's search particulars each and every week. This weekly service offers an effective and efficient tool for delivering patent-based intelligence to your entire team.

Our beta testers are using this new service to:

-monitor the patents and applications that publish under a firm's name each week
-monitor the patent activity of a competitor or series of competitors
-monitor the development of a client's (or your own) patent portfolio
-keep the business team up to date on the patent activity of the company
-monitor a particular technology, by keyword and/or USPTO class number

You can download a sample Weekly report at the following URL:
http://patentfizz.com/pdf/fp/samples/fpr_kmob_patents_110607.pdf

Customers of this new service will receive a FirstPage Report based on their search particulars each and every week. We can deliver Reports on Tuesday (issued patents only), Thursday (published applications only), both of those days, or on Friday (both patents and applications in a single Report).

Our pricing structure is simple:

$5/week/search - no matter the delivery schedule you select.

During this pre-launch special, Promote the Progress readers can get a full year of the FirstPage Weekly service for $100 - a discount of 50% on the yearly price that will be announced on PatentFizz soon.

To take advantage of this offer, just send an e-mail message with the following information to orders@patentfizz.com:

1. E-mail address to which the Reports should be sent
2. The search to be conducted each week (if you're not familiar with PTO search strings, just tell us what you're looking for and we'll work with you to generate an appropriate search string)
3. Your preferred delivery schedule (Tuesdays, Thursdays, both of those days, or Fridays; Note that this doesn't affect the price, and can always be changed later)
4. Payment preference - tell us if you'd like to pay by credit card, paypal, or to be invoiced for the charge. We'll follow up with particulars later
5. Mention that you saw this post on Promote the Progress

We'll confirm your order and start issuing your FirstPage Weekly this week.

Oh...and here's the best part. If you set up an order now, you'll enjoy the discounted rates on all future orders, too (most beta testers have asked for more Weekly Reports once they see the first few).

Thanks again for your continued support and interest in my projects. If you have any questions about this new service or this offer, please send an e-mail to orders@patentfizz.com.

Posted by J Matthew Buchanan at 09:15 AM | Permalink

Last week on PatentFizz, we rolled out some great improvements to our FirstPage Reports product, which gives you a single .pdf document containing the first page of every patent document in your project.

On Friday, we announced a significant improvement to the 'user-friendliness' of the ordering process. Now, you can copy your USPTO search results and paste them directly into the Report order form. No matter the search, just copy everything from the results listing and paste it into the order form. The script will extract the numbers for every utility, design, and reissue patent - as well published applications - in the listing, and give you a link that lets you immediately download your Report.

You can read more about this great new feature in this Fizzure post. And this screencast will help you appreciate the simplicity of it.

This new feature, we think, will give you a whole new way to work with USPTO search results.

Wondering how folks are using our FirstPage Reports? Read this post. Ready to order your own, or perhaps try the free 5 document version?

Posted by J Matthew Buchanan at 08:11 AM | Permalink

Our Patent and Trademark Office has taken a decidedly activist bent over recent years, single-handedly elevating itself from patent system administrator to patent policy maker. Today's injunction against the new rules is the first serious wound inflicted on this new animal, and now we must all wait to see if it's a mortal one...or a mere flesh wound that might, in the long run, make the beast stronger.

Responsible activism would probably be welcome. No one disputes that the Office has serious backlog and quality issues that must be addressed. The patent community - all sides of it - would no doubt welcome carefully planned and fully contemplated changes to the administrative process that are designed to increase efficiency and quality. Indeed, this is the pipe dream many stakeholders bought into years ago when lending support to a significant fee increase.

But, unfortunately, the Office has seemingly decided that its role in our patent system is much greater than it actually is. Placing limits on an applicant's ability to protect his or her fully disclosed invention is the province of Congress and the democratic process, not that of the regulators and notice and comment rulemaking. This is especially true when the explanation offered by the Office for the need for the rules is the fabled 'continuation abuse' and not the old-reliable problem of the application backlog.

Making matters worse, the attitude of the Office during this nearly two year affair has been nothing short of brash and arrogant. From the early "you'll have to sue us" comments regarding the Office's authority to limit continuation filings to the final decision that dropped the biggest patent prosecution deadline since the GATT date squarely on Halloween - a holiday celebrated immediately after 'normal' business hours, not in the morning - the Office has repeatedly shown a new air of arrogance to the patent community. The end result will likely be - and probably already is - an evaporation of the sense of partnership that seemed to exist just a few years ago. Pity.

The new attitude shows itself even today - at the time of writing this post - nearly two and a half hours after the first blog post on the issuance of the injunction, the Office still has not put any information regarding the injunction on its website. Surely the administration knew an injunction was a possibility (unless the arrogance runs so deep that they couldn't fathom the possibility of a loss). Surely they knew that a surge of deadline-inspired filings was coming (and already in process). Surely they appreciated the fact that every minute, on this day, was critical. Surely they didn't mean to shirk their administrative responsibility to disseminate information relating to the patent prosecution process. Surely they weren't going for political effect when they chose to talk to the Wall Street Journal before talking to their own customers.

The injunction is nothing short of a watershed moment that will - in time - tell us if this new animal lives or dies. Patent reform appears to now be focused on the question 'what is the proper role of the Office in our patent system?'

Posted by J Matthew Buchanan at 02:25 PM | Permalink

word has it that an injunction was just issued on the new rules.....

KUDOS to PLI's live blogging of this important event.

Posted by J Matthew Buchanan at 12:33 PM | Permalink

No one has time to discuss the new rules in depth today (my two sons send a special thank you to USPTO policy makers for picking a holiday as new-rules-eve), so I thought we could just give a brief moment of silence to 35 U.S.C. s.120:

"An application for patent for an invention disclosed in the manner provided by the first paragraph of section 112 of this title in an application previously filed in the United States, or as provided by section 363 of this title, which is filed by an inventor or inventors named in the previously filed application shall have the same effect, as to such invention, as though filed on the date of the prior application, if filed before the patenting or abandonment of or termination of proceedings on the first application or on an application similarly entitled to the benefit of the filing date of the first application and if it contains or is amended to contain a specific reference to the earlier filed application. No application shall be entitled to the benefit of an earlier filed application under this section unless an amendment containing the specific reference to the earlier filed application is submitted at such time during the pendency of the application as required by the Director. The Director may consider the failure to submit such an amendment within that time period as a waiver of any benefit under this section. The Director may establish procedures, including the payment of a surcharge, to accept an unintentionally delayed submission of an amendment under this section."

Posted by J Matthew Buchanan at 10:56 AM | Permalink

This quote, from Hans Sauer - Associate General Counsel for the Biotechnology Industry Organization - perfectly positions the hi-tech/life-tech divide on patent reform legislation:

"Will I, 30 years from now, pay $10 less for an iPod and have a 10 percent less chance that Alzheimer's medicine will be available?" (source)

The source article reports that life-tech lobbying efforts have stalled the Senate reform bill, and hints at what might be hi-tech's next political move on the patent reform issue - an attack on the unitary nature of our patent system (a concept that has been lurking in the background for some time now).

"You have a group of companies that are happy with the status quo, and are saying, 'Don't change it; it's not broken,'" [Bruce Sewel, Intel executive Vice President and General Counsel] said. "That's fine, but it's broken for a lot of other people." (emphasis added)

Posted by J Matthew Buchanan at 09:50 AM | Permalink

Our patent system has two primary purposes -

1. To encourage disclosure of inventions, and

2. To encourage development of new ideas by fostering design around efforts

Seems to me our great, world-leading patent system is now failing to achieve these purposes in at least two regards...with a third complication on the horizon:

1. - The Old. The "bury your head in the sand and don't read patents" effect of our duty to disclose provisions is legendary around the globe, basically encouraging our best and brightest to avoid reading patents (and other technical references) in fear of having knowledge that they later forget to disclose in an application that might bear only a marginal relationship to the subject matter of the ignored patents. Combine this with the guarantee of an inequitable conduct charge - well-founded or not - should the resulting patent ever be litigated, and you can understand why some technical folks shudder at the sight of patents. Poof! So much for sparking new ideas.

2. - The Now. That which is disclosed in a patent application and not claimed is, of course, dedicated to the public. Our shiny new Patent Office rules now place arbitrary limits on the number of claims that can be obtained for a disclosed invention, which has our brightest inventors telling their patent attorneys "naw...let's not disclose that embodiment right now...I'm afraid I won't be able to claim it. " After carefully considering the best mode requirement, many inventors are, I suspect, sending many wonderful alternative embodiments straight to the cutting room floor. So much for encouraging disclosure.

3. - The Future. Combine #2 with an elimination of the best mode requirement - which has been the subject of patent reform bills for the last several years - and you'll get a glimpse of our system of the future. Rubber stamped, narrow protection that fails to encourage much of anything. Ouch.

How's that for promoting progress?

Posted by J Matthew Buchanan at 02:36 PM | Permalink

Wondering what I did on my summer "vacation"? Go check out the all-new PatentFizz, which was launched this week, and you'll get an idea.

You'll notice right away that the site has been completely redesigned. It's a bit easier on the eyes, you might say. The FizzDisplay pages present the abstract, claims, and bibliographic information in an attractive, easy to read format that loads quickly. The FizzDisplay is sweet, instant gratification.

The improvements are not just cosmetic, though. Nope....PatentFizz has an impressive slate of all new features designed to more effectively deliver patent-based information. I'll be detailing these features on Fizzure, the PatentFizz blog, over the coming weeks, so be sure to subscribe to the RSS feed.

I'll let one new feature out of the bag now....you can download patent pdf's right from the new FizzDisplay page for a particular patent. Just look for the "PDF" box in the upper right portion of the FizzDisplay page for your patent and click the "Go" button. A new page will load that presents an ad while the .pdf is assembled. Once ready, a link for the .pdf will appear...just right or control click it and save the file to your machine. Presto!

As always, please let me know if you have any comments, questions or suggestions.

Posted by J Matthew Buchanan at 08:38 AM | Permalink

PatentFizz was recently mentioned in A patent improvement, a feature article in The Economist magazine's Technology Quarterly. Read the article online here or pick up the September 8-14th print edition at your local newstand.

Andy Oram, the story's author, does an excellent job of profiling the Peer to Patent project, which aims to open the examination of patent applications to the public. Well worth the read.

Posted by J Matthew Buchanan at 11:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I note the following from today's floor debate of H.R. 1908, The Patent Reform Act of 2007:

1. Patent trolls and "bad patents" continue to be the rallying cry of the reformers. Amazing, then, that no mention was made of eBay v. MercExchange, KSR v. Teleflex, or the PTO rules limiting the ability to file continuation applications. Not one mention.

2. Patent reform has been fully politicized. The reformers have deftly called on the majority's ability to control the rules of debate. A dissenting Democratic voice, Marcy Kaptur (from my hometown of Toledo, OH) stated it best (paraphrasing):

"Our time should not be squashed on this important issue" (speaking in an elevated voice over the speaker telling her that her time has expired)

Let the games begin.

Posted by J Matthew Buchanan at 01:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)