Department of Commerce January 3, 2006 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

On September 7, 2005, the Department of Commerce (the Department) published in the Federal Register the preliminary results and preliminary partial rescission of the administrative review of the antidumping duty order on Oil Country Tubular Goods (OCTG) from Japan. This review covers four manufactures/exporters: JFE Steel Corporation (JFE), Nippon Steel Corporation (Nippon), NKK Tubes (NKK) and Sumitomo Metal Industries, Ltd. (SMI). The period of review (POR) covers sales of subject merchandise to the United States during the period of August 1, 2003, through July 31, 2004. We provided interested parties with an opportunity to comment on the preliminary results of review. However, we received no comments from interested parties. Consequently, no changes have been made to the dumping margins set forth in the preliminary results of this administrative review. For the margins applicable to each respondent, see the ``Final Results of Review'' section of this notice.

M.A. Notch Corporation (Notch) filed a request for a changed circumstances review of the antidumping duty (AD) order on certain cased pencils from the People's Republic of China (PRC). Specifically, Notch requests that the Department revoke the AD order with respect to a large novelty pencil, which is described below. Certain domestic interested parties have affirmatively expressed a lack of interest in the continuation of the order with respect to this product.\1\ In response to the request, the Department initiated a changed circumstances review of the AD order on certain cased pencils from the PRC. Interested parties are invited to comment on these preliminary results.

On September 1, 2005, the Department of Commerce (``the Department'') published a notice of initiation of the second sunset reviews of the antidumping duty orders on welded ASTM A-312 stainless steel pipe (``WSSP'') from South Korea (``Korea'') and Taiwan, pursuant to section 751(c) of the Tariff Act of 1930, as amended (``the Act''). On the basis of a notice of intent to participate and adequate substantive responses from the domestic interested parties and no response from respondent interested parties, the Department has conducted expedited sunset reviews of these antidumping duty orders. As a result of these sunset reviews, the Department finds that revocation of the antidumping duty orders would likely lead to continuation or recurrence of dumping at the level indicated in the ``Final Results of Review'' section of this notice.

NMFS publishes this final rule to clarify that the fee regulations for the Pacific Coast groundfish fishing capacity reduction program do not apply to any shrimp landed under Washington State fishing licenses for Puget Sound shrimp. The fee regulations remain otherwise unchanged. The purpose of this final rule is to clarify that the fee rules do not apply to the Puget Sound licenses.

Continued examination practice, including the use of both continuing applications and requests for continued examination, permits applicants to obtain further examination and advance an application to final agency action. This practice allow applicants to craft their claims in light of the examiner's evidence and arguments, which in turn may lead to well-designed claims that give the public notice of precisely what the applicant regards as his or her invention. However, each continued examination filing, whether a continuing application or request for continued examination, requires the United States Patent and Trademark Office (Office) to delay taking up a new application and thus contributes to the backlog of unexamined applications before the Office. In addition, current practice allows an applicant to generate an unlimited string of continued examination filings from an initial application. In such a string of continued examination filings, the exchange between examiners and applicants becomes less beneficial and suffers from diminishing returns as each of the second and subsequent continuing applications or requests for continued examination in a series is filed. Moreover, the possible issuance of multiple patents arising from such a process tends to defeat the public notice function of patent claims in the initial application. The Office is making every effort to become more efficient, to ensure that the patent application process promotes innovation, and to improve the quality of issued patents. With respect to continued examination practice, the Office is proposing to revise the patent rules of practice to better focus the application process. The revised rules would require that second or subsequent continued examination filings, whether a continuation application, a continuation-in-part application, or a request for continued examination, be supported by a showing as to why the amendment, argument, or evidence presented could not have been previously submitted. It is expected that these rules will make the exchange between examiners and applicants more efficient and effective. The revised rules should also improve the quality of issued patents, making them easier to evaluate, enforce, and litigate. Moreover, under the revised rules patents should issue sooner, thus giving the public a clearer understanding of what is patented. The revised rules would also ease the burden of examining multiple applications that have the same effective filing date, overlapping disclosure, a common inventor, and common assignee by requiring that all patentably indistinct claims in such applications be submitted in a single application. The changes proposed in this notice will also allow the Office to focus its patent examining resources on new applications instead of multiple continued examination filings that contain amendments or evidence that could have been submitted earlier, and thus allow the Office to reduce the backlog of unexamined applications. This will mean faster and more effective examination for the vast majority of applicants without any additional work on the applicant's part. Additional resources will be devoted to multiple continued examination filings only where necessary. Comment Deadline Date: To be ensured of consideration, written comments must be received on or before May 3, 2006. No public hearing will be held.