USPTO director praises Obama administration’s IP initiatives

The director of the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has praised the intellectual property initiatives of President Barack Obama’s administration in a report released by the organisation.

Michelle Lee, the under secretary for IP and director of the USPTO, made the comments in the USPTO’s “Performance and Accountability Report (PAR) for fiscal year 2016”.

Lee said that “the findings in the report strongly suggest that the IP initiatives of the Obama administration—building on those of the [President Harry] Truman administration and others—have benefited not only our nation’s innovators and entrepreneurs, but also the American public and economy at large”.

Addressing the USPTO’s patent backlog, Lee said that at the start of the Obama administration, the office had 750,000 unexamined patent applications.

However, in the 2016 fiscal year, that number had reduced to about 540,000, a decline of more than 28% in spite of an annual increase in filings of almost 4%.

In 2011, Obama signed into law the America Invents Act (AIA), which awards patents on a “first to file” basis rather than “first to invent”.

The report praised the reforms enacted under the AIA which helped the USPTO “improve and clarify” patent rights, reduce the patent backlog, and offered “effective alternatives to costly patent litigation”.

Lee added that the AIA “went considerably further than did the previous patent acts” as it “harmonised US patent law with the rest of the world’s by switching to a first-inventor-to-file regime.

It also “created a new Patent Trial and Appeal Board with new post-grant proceedings, providing quicker and less expensive alternatives to district court litigation; and granted the USPTO fee-setting authority”.

On November 8 last year, President-elect Donald Trump won the required 306 electoral college votes in the US Presidential Election. He will take office on January 20.

The USPTO report can be viewed in full here.