Patent and Trademark Office January 3, 2006 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

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.