Patent Law

A First Look at USPTO Petitions Data

By Dennis Crouch

Earlier this week, one of my excellent patent law students (Lawrence Higgins) plowed through 64 sets of recent USPTO petitions decisions. The decisions came from a group of randomly selected patent applications with application serial numbers 11/900,000 –  11/999,999. The vast majority of petitions were granted (78%) although about 20% were first rejected before being later granted after the applicant provided further information or argument. 

I categorized the petitions into groups.  The largest group consisted of petitions requesting revival of an abandoned application. 25% of the petitions were revival petitions with 94% being granted. 22% of the petitions involved the applicant attempting to establish a priority date. The next largest category of petitions were petitions to make special. In this group, all nine of the petitions to make special were based on the inventor's age (over 65 years) and all were granted. The remaining petitions involved a hodgepodge collection of issues such as attorney requests to withdraw representation, patent term adjustment corrections, refunds, corrections, and republication.  None of the petitions in our sample challenged a restriction requirement.

• I'm working on a more complete study of the petitions decisions data.
• Petitions are Available for Download Here

Full post as published by Patently Obvious on October 25, 2010 (boomark / email).