The march towards privatization of all government functions continues...
Excerpts below from
article on law.com:
Patent examiners will lose a big chunk of their workload -- searching for prior art related to applications -- under a proposal announced Monday by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Along with the job of examining applications, patent examiners currently search for prior art. PTO Director James Rogan said in a news conference that under his plan, applicants would have searches done by one of four sources: a private outside contractor; the patent office of another country; a country certified to do searches under the Patent Cooperation Treaty; or the PTO.
The PTO, however, will limit its searches to those for small, independent inventors.
Rogan said the goal of the plan is to reduce the length of time applications are pending at the agency from the current average of more than two years to 18 months by 2008, and to make the patent and trademark process almost entirely electronic.
Over a period of five years, the program will reduce the PTO's costs by $500 million, Rogan said.
But critics worry that outsourcing will result in inconsistent quality and may lead to an abuse of the system.
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Rogan says the new patent program is designed to move the PTO from a one-size-fits-all process to a four-track examination process that "leverages search results of other organizations and permits applicants to have freedom of choice in the timing of the processing of their applications."
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The outsourcing of prior art searches and deferral of examinations are potentially the most controversial aspects of the plan, patent attorneys say. The details of the strategic plan were not available Monday afternoon.
The agency expects to receive 340,000 patent applications this year, which will join a backlog of 408,000 applications. The office has about 3,400 patent examiners and plans to hire 950 this year. Rogan said a reduction in patent searches by the PTO would eliminate the need to hire an additional 2,500 examiners through 2008.
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David Stevens, a patent prosecutor and name partner at San Jose, Calif.'s Stevens & Westberg, said, "I think quality control is a bigger issue than conflict of interest. If searching is done exclusively by the PTO, you at least get the same quality, since it is managed fairly uniformly. If it is outsourced, it is difficult -- if not impossible -- to monitor the quality."
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While the PTO has been swamped with patent applications, the agency has seen a sharp decline in trademark applications. As a result, Rogan told trademark examiners last week that he would be laying off 135 of the PTO's 383 trademark examiners effective Sept. 30.
"Last year new applications dropped 21 percent, which was the largest annual decrease ever," Rogan wrote in an e-mail message to examiners. "This year looks worse: The drop in filings will give us a 33 percent decrease in filings over the last two years. ... There simply is insufficient work to retain a staff of 383 attorneys when we only have enough work for about 248 of them."