The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office requested a $2.71 billion budget for 2012, a 16 percent increase from the previous year.
The patent office says the 2012 budget “will contribute to America’s innovation economy and promote economic growth and competitiveness by cutting the average overall processing time of a patent application from 35 months to 20 months by 2015.”
The investment also will enable the USPTO to implement pendency-reduction initiatives and information technology upgrades as well as hire more patent examiners.
The USPTO is entirely funded on user fees.
Under the recently announced Three-Track proposal, patent applicants can elect to accelerate their highest priority applications and have these applications processed within 12 months for a cost recovery-based fee. Applicants can also elect processing at the current average processing time (Track 2) or to defer examination and the payment of fees (Track 3).
“Innovation is a key driver of growth for the U.S. economy, and IP rights play an essential role in bringing new innovations to market,” USPTO Director David Kappos said in a press release. “We are committed to making the USPTO more efficient and reducing the unacceptably long pendency patent processing times, so that the ingenuity of the American people can flourish and help to boost our economy and create jobs.”
The budget will:
• Expand patent examining corps by hiring 1,500 examiners, of which 500 would replace examiner attritions, and 300 will be dedicated to Track 1 accelerated examination processing in order to ensure that other applications are not adversely effected.
• Reengineering patent processes to increase efficiency.
• Facilitate work sharing arrangements with foreign intellectual property offices which help reduce patent pendency by eliminating unnecessary duplication of work between offices.
• Establish a nationwide workforce by expanding telework and focusing on hiring examiners with previous intellectual property experience from around the country.
A projected $2.71 billion in fee collections would be used to fund the budget request. These fee collections will be derived from the current user fee schedule, and include an 1.4 percent adjustment on patent statutory fees consistent with the annual Consumer Price Index (CPI) increase, and assumes implementation of the 15 percent surcharge on patent fees that was proposed for FY 2011.
To fulfill the commitments in the USPTO 2010-2015 Strategic Plan and the FY 2012 budget, the USPTO needs the flexibility to set fees along with other improvements contained in proposed patent reform legislation, as well as the resources provided by both the FY 2011 and FY 2012 budget requests. The Obama Administration continues to support granting the USPTO fee-setting authority as a significant part of a sustainable funding model that would allow the Director to propose and set fees in a manner that better reflects the actual cost of USPTO services.
Further details on the USPTO 2010-2015 Strategic Plan can be found online: http://www.uspto.gov/about/stratplan/USPTO_2010-2015_Strategic_Plan.pdf
Further details on the FY 2012 Budget Request can be found: http://www.uspto.gov/about/stratplan/budget/fy12pbr.pdf
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