The USPTO has issued new guidance on subject matter eligibility under § 101. The document, entitled “2014 Interim Guidance on Patent Subject Matter Eligibility” (Interim Eligibility Guidance), comes in the wake of the recent Supreme Court decisions in Mayo, Myriad, and Alice Corp. that have shaken up the way patent examiners determine if an idea is patentable. Prior to the Interim Eligibility Guidance's release on December 15th, patent examiners relied primarily on two documents released earlier this year: (1) the Myriad/Mayo guidance issued on March 4th; and (2) the Alice Corp. guidance issued on June 25th. The new document supplements the latter and supersedes the former.

SAWS. If you think it sounds ominous, you’re not the first. Alyssa Bereznak at Yahoo Tech recently broke the story on this shadowy USPTO system.

At Juristat, we use big data analytics to help patent lawyers predict the future. As of the Summer of 2014, our dataset includes over 5.5 million U.S. patent applications, with some applications dating back to the early 1900s. Each patent application is made up of a series of interrelated documents stored in tsv or xml formats. Further, patent applications can be connected to other applications through parent-child relationships. Unlike most big data projects with large constantly streaming data feeds, the patent system moves at a glacial pace, with an average application receiving an new event once every few months. We’ve begun the transition from our existing MySQL database system to a NoSQL document store, and based on our needs  we considered MongoDB and RethinkDB as potential solutions. Below are the findings of our benchmarking and testing

Friday May 23, 2014

 
Simple Legal

Lists identifying top patent blogs are woefully out of date, as many of the blogs listed have been completely abandoned by their authors.

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Juristat conducted an analysis which reviewed trends in examiner behavior immediately following an interview with the applicant. Specifically, we calculated the percentage of examiner interviews after first rejection that result in NOA with amendment, NOA w/o amendment, rejection, or no decision. What we found is that particular examiners often heavily favor one outcome over another. The data shown in this blog post is the result of analysis across our entire dataset. We do not factor art unit or time periods into our calculations. We only use examiners who are listed on more than 100 applications and who have had at least one application with an examiner interview after first rejection. Therefore, our normalized sample consists of 6556 examiners. From that pool we calculated the following statistics:

By default, patent applications filed in the United States publish eighteen months after their earliest effective filing date. However, under 35 U.S.C 122(b)(2)(B)(i)[1], an applicant may file a non-publication request which, if certain requirements are met, allows for the application to remain unpublished beyond eighteen months, to be published only if and when a patent is granted. If the application is abandoned, then the contents of the application will remain unpublished indefinitely. I know from time to time we have all wondered which firms and in-house counsels are filing all of these secret patent applications. Well, Juristat knows. Below is a graph of the Top 15 filers of non-published patent applications publications that were ultimately granted.