USPTO Technology Center Deep Dive: A Look at TC 3600

Technology Center 3600 is perhaps the most infamous of all technology centers at the USPTO. As a “catch-all” technology center handling applications as diverse as surface transportation and furniture, it also houses many business methods art units.

Referred to as the “patent pit of despair,” TC 3600 was seen for many years as a place where software patent applications went to die due to the extraordinarily high rate of Alice rejections issued. This reputation has waned somewhat due to the USPTO’s 2019 subject matter eligibly guidelines update, which introduced stricter standards for issuing Alice rejections to examiners, but the business methods art units of TC 3600 continue to have allowance rates significantly below the USPTO average. The best strategy for practitioners to avoid an Alice rejection is to carefully draft their claims so as to minimize the chances of assignment to a difficult art unit with the help of big data analytics.

We've written about Alice and it's relationship to TC 3600 before:

• Was the 2019 Revised Subject Matter Eligibility Guidance Successful? (March 2021)
• The State of Patent Eligibility in America (June 2019)
• Alice’s Favorite Class: Class 705 (January 2019)
• Alice: Where Are We Now? (December 2018)

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This is part of an ongoing series digging into USPTO metrics. To see all our technology center profiles, click here.