Patent and Trademark Office May 26, 2021 – Federal Register Recent Federal Regulation Documents

The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO or Office) proposes to amend the rules of practice to permit higher- capacity physical media to be submitted to the USPTO. Patent applications for certain inventions require significant data in American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII) text format to be submitted to the USPTO in order to determine whether the invention described in the patent application is patentable. When submission of such data exceeds the USPTO's patent electronic filing system capacity, direct submission would not be possible for a large data submission in ASCII text format. To that end, the rules of practice are proposed to be amended to provide applicants with the ability to use physical media larger than compact discs (CDs) for submission of an electronic version of amino acid and nucleotide sequence information, information compiled in a large table, and information relating to a computer program listing. Additionally, changes regarding extraction of compressed data files, which had not been permitted in the past for certain submissions, would be permitted if compliant with the requirements of the proposed rules. Other rules relating to certain obsolete and non-secure methods of presenting data would be eliminated.