The new director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in San Jose, California, said that the office is committed to solving part of the patent backlog this year, but at the same time it is also facing a huge test.
When David Couples became the new director of the office in August 2009, the USPTO already had a backlog of 750,000 unprocessed patents. The office hopes to reduce the backlog to 700,000 patents by the end of this year. We still have a long way to go to achieve this goal. If successful, this will be the first significant reduction in the patent backlog in the past 10 years, Capos said in a conference call, which was also a media review of his work in the first 13 months of taking office. "I think we have made some progress, but we are also facing huge challenges and we still have a lot of work to do," he said.
Even if the backlog can be successfully reduced by 6.7 percentage points, the number of new applications this year will still increase by 4 percentage points. The entire application pending process, the time it takes to process an application, remains at 35.4 months, unchanged since Couples took office.
Engineers say they are frustrated and dissatisfied with the unpredictability of the Patent and Trademark Office taking three to eight years to process an application. Capos said that the patent backlog and the long waiting time for application approval are the "most pressing problems" facing the office.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office released an online dashboard this week that displays the office’s monthly progress. The dashboard shows that the Patent and Trademark Office's more than 6,000 examiners still face a backlog of 728,000 applications.
Capos has completed a series of preliminary measures during his first 13 months in office, including revising the office's performance evaluation methods for its patent examiners and front-line managers. The Patent and Trademark Office has also revised the work manual for patent examiners and added the function of providing online comments.
In addition, the Office also launched a pilot project to expedite the processing of patents related to climate change. Earlier this year, Couples proposed a "three-track" patent system, which caused some controversy during a public comment period and has now been revised. Couples also began upgrading the agency's computer system, which had been criticized for requiring examiners to use multiple systems when processing prior art searches. Ideal search is sometimes called integrated search or federated search, says Capos. ?This is a long-term goal and a difficult problem to overcome, so we will solve it step by step. ?
The first major change will be to consolidate some, but not all, of the databases that reviewers need to access into a single system. This will happen sometime in 2012, he said. A former appeals court chief judge is calling for $1 billion in incentive funds to be allocated to the Patent and Trademark Office to upgrade computers and hire more examiners. At the same time, the bureau requested a modest increase to its fiscal year 2011 budget to $2.322 billion. President Obama said he has requested "substantial increases" in the Patent and Trademark Office's budget in his 2012 budget proposal. (Compiled from)