Patents for Humanity is the USPTO awards competition recognizing inventors and innovators who develop game-changing technology to meet global humanitarian challenges. With the application deadline quickly approaching, we take a look at some of the past award recipients and celebrate their impact on society today.

For patent applicants looking to move quickly, the USPTO's Track One program is a seemingly obvious choice. But does the program, which was instituted in 2011, still work? The answer is yes – but not like it used to.

The USPTO recently hosted a webinar about the general approach to interpreting claims and how the specification interacts with and modifies those claims. With the goal of providing answers to common examiner questions, the webinar specifically discussed the importance of the broadest reasonable interpretation (BRI) of each claim, how to handle claim limitations, and the added difficulty of limitations related to 35 USC 112(f) (aka “Means-or-Step-Plus-Function” Limitations). The hope is to create consistent examination guidance that ensures all claims will be interpreted similarly by anyone of ordinary skill in the art. 

An Overview of Patent Prosecution Trends at the USPTO Since the Year 2000

Since the year 2000, there have been major shifts in law, policy, and the technological landscape that have had profound impacts on patent prosecution practice at the USPTO. Although we often focus our analytics on small corners of the USPTO, such as individual industries, art unit groups, and practice entities, we rarely take a step back to evaluate the general trends at work across the entire USPTO. Now, we'll pull back the curtain to reveal a few USPTO-wide prosecution trends.  

This page is intended to be a general resource for patent prosecutors to use to get a bird's-eye view of the state of patent prosecution trends across the USPO. 

Check back often, as we will periodically update this information and add new charts and graphs to bring you even more groundbreaking insights.