Patent stakeholders, including portfolio owners and practitioners alike, are feeling the pain of the dramatically lower allowance rate that we’ve been living with for some time now.
But is the lower allowance rate actually resulting in fewer patents being granted?
When asked this question, I thought the answer was obvious, but had to admit I didn’t know. So I collected some data from USPTO and charted year-over-year weekly patent grants. Turns out, about 13% fewer utility patents have been granted so far in 2008 as compared to the same year-to-date period in 2006.
The difference was a bit smaller than I would have guessed, but the exercise revealed an interesting pattern to the grant process and got me thinking about issue and maintenance fees, and the potential impact of lost income on the PTO fee structure.
Check out this chart illustrating the weekly utility grant data, posted in the new Metrics section of Promote the Progress, for a detailed analysis.
Related posts:
- Patent Office to assess practitioner maintenance fees
- The practitioner maintenance fee and the promise that should not have been made
- Google’s sea-based data center patent highlights the narrow focus of the company’s call for patent reform
- The USPTO Practitioner Maintenance Fee – Back on the table?
- Inconsistency between Patent Office and Federal Circuit applications of Bilski?
Tags: USPTO
[...] See Matt Buchanan’s post on statistics that are relevant to this discussion http://promotetheprogress.com/blog/new-on-metrics-utility-patent-grants-down-13-as-compared-to-2006/… No TweetBacks yet. (Be the first to Tweet this [...]