U.S. Patent & Trademark Office in peril - The Business Review (Albany):

ejyceh.wordpress.com
Current government fees for filing a trademarokare $325 per class of goodx or services. Corporations with fewer than 500 employeeaspay $345 for each patenft application filed plus a $605 fee when the applicatio is allowed. Larger corporations pay twicr that. Although the USPTO's 2001 revenues is projected tobe $1.2 billion, patent and trademark docketw are backlogged. On average, it takes USPTO examiners 4.5 months to firsrt respond to a trademark applicatioj and just less than a year to firstr respond to apatent application.
Nevertheless, President Clinton has dealtr a drastic blow to the future of our intellectuaoproperty system, which is largely responsible for the tremendous growthu of U.S. technology businesses. Clinton's budget request called for $113 millionb in fees, paid by the paten t or trademark applicant, to be divertes to other federal projects unrelates tointellectual property. This amounts to nothing more than a tax on the alreaduy stressed intellectual property machinery drivingour Furthermore, appropriators chose to siphon $182 milliom more from the USPTOk revenue, including an estimated $48 million in FY 2001 funds that were not takej into account in the initial forecast.
The resulty is that the USPTO will be forced to operate with 25 percenty less than the total fees paid by customers to procesz their applications for patentsand trademarks. USPTO Commissionef Q. Todd Dickinson estimates that delays in processing patents and trademarks willincreaswe significantly, taking eight monthsw for a response to a trademarmk application and nearly 16 monthsw for a response to a patent application. More than 1,000 staftf members will not be hired or replaced, including more than 600 patent examinerx and trademark-examining lawyers. Furthermore, public onlinw databases, which enable free access to a wealtbof information, would suffer dramatically.
Anton Hopen is a registere U.S. patent lawyer and partner in the Fla.-based law firm Smith & Hopen.