"Gobble up some of these a-maize-ing patents and trademarks"

For your Thanksgiving enjoyment, I refer you to the USPTO's Kid's Pages to feast (I love puns as much as the USPTO does) on some patents and trademarks from their files.

Most of the patents are turkey-related, though a few, like this gravy separator, are ostensibly vegetarian-friendly.

While you're there, take a look at some of the other features in the Kid's Pages. If you have kids, work with kids, or are a kid, you may find yourself thankful that the Department of Commerce put so much into these pages.

USPTO Annual Report for FY 2008 shows record

The USPTO released their annual report for FY 2008 yesterday, and boy was it a doozy. Here are some highlights from their press release:

Patents – Optimizing Patent Quality and Timeliness

In FY 2008, USPTO met and, in some cases, exceeded its patent pendency, production, and quality targets. Patents maintained a high level of patent quality by achieving an allowance compliance rate of 96.3 percent, exceeding its goal.

• Patents increased production by an additional 14 percent over FY 2007 by examining 448,003 applications—the highest number in history. Production has increased by 38.6 percent over the past four years, compared to a 21.3 percent increase in application filings during the same period.
• Patents received a record number of utility patent applications filed electronically (332,617), and achieved a record rate (72.1 percent) of applications filed electronically as well.
• Patents achieved an average first action pendency of 25.6 months and an average total pendency of 32.2 months.
• Patents received 1,765 patent application filings through the Accelerated Examination Program, 173 percent more than in the program’s introductory year of FY 2007. A 12-month or less pendency rate was also maintained for every application, with an average time to final action or allowance of 186 days.

Trademarks – Optimizing Trademark Quality and Timeliness

For the third year in a row, USPTO met or exceeded all of its performance goals for trademarks as well.

• Trademarks ended its year with first action pendency at three months. Trademarks has maintained its first action pendency within the 2.5 to 3.5 month range for more than 18 months, a historic first. Disposal pendency was also maintained at record low levels, ending the year with 11.8 months pendency for cases without inter partes or suspended cases and at 13.9 months for all disposals. This disposal pendency is the lowest in 20 years.
• This year saw a record number of applications filed electronically--approximately 268,000 applications comprising 390,000 classes. This represented a record rate of filing; 96.9 percent of all applications were filed electronically.
• Quality remained high throughout the year with a first action compliance rate of 95.8 percent and a final action compliance rate of 97.2 percent. Both measures exceeded performance expectations.

That's right, '08 saw records in both patent applications and electronic trademark applications.

View the full report here.

Trademarks:Some tips for searching for images at the USPTO

Based on my experience helping people at our reference desk, I would argue that images are perhaps the greatest source of confusion for fledgling trademark searchers. I suspect that this is because the predominant 21st Century searching habit -- namely, keyword searching -- relies on matching words directly rather than filtering words through an index. Given the amount of information available through the Internet, keyword searching works just fine to call up text-based resources, but it really falls short when it comes to non-text information like pictures. Image searching through popular search engines is OK when you quickly need a picture of, say, an ostrich pulling a cart, but for a legal need like a trademark search, when a business' identity (not to mention a lot of money!) is at stake, something more reliable is necessary.

Anyone familiar with the United States Patent Classification understands just how seriously the USPTO takes their indexing. And for the same reasons patent searchers must take the time to learn the USPC, a person eager to perform a comprehensive trademark search at the USPTO would do well to learn how to use the trademark Design Search Code Manual.

Every trademark that is based on an image is assigned a Design Code (DC) at the time of registration. Once registered, those marks are available through the Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) and are searchable through that DC that an examiner assigned. To find marks containing a specific image, a searcher can find the corresponding DC number using an online version of the Design Search Code Manual (sorry, no acronym for this one).

That's a mouthful, I know, but it's really more simple than it sounds. The idea is that you can look up words that describe what your image is, match those words to the appropriate DC number, then look up that number in the trademark database to inspect other marks that have that DC number.

Let's say, for example, that I have a line of gardening gloves. I call them Moose Gloves and I've had a gifted artist create this logo as my brand:
Before I register my new trademark, I want to make sure that nobody else has registered a mark in the same class of goods that resembles my mark.

Using TESS, I can search for the words that I plan to use in my mark, but I also want to make sure that I catch any similar images before I send the application. To do this, I'll consult the Design Search Code Manual. Under "M," I scroll down until I see moose (that's what the drawing is, by the way). The Manual tells me that the DC number for moose is 03.07.07.

If you're not entirely sure that a DC number adequately describes your image, you can click on the number to get examples. I should also mention that the Manual is pretty comprehensive and includes codes for geometric shapes, celestial bodies, mythological figures, ethnic groups -- if you can imagine the variety of trademarked images you've encountered in your life, just think that there's a DC number assigned to each.

To continue with our example, now that I have a DC number for my moose, I can go to TESS, choose the "structured form search," then enter the number (without punctuation, so my moose would be "030707"). In the drop-down menu in the field box, choose Design Code. If you want to narrow the results of the search, you can also enter a US class number in the second search box. (Class numbers are found using the Trademark Acceptable Identification of Goods and Services manual, which you can access online here.) If you do enter a search term in the second box, make sure to change the operator, on the right side of the screen, from "or" to "and."

When you click search, this will bring up a list of all, if any, registered marks that match your search. To browse the images that came up from your search, look for a blue button at the top of the screen that says "image list." Clicking this will bring up just the images in a way that makes it easy to scroll through and look at your search results.

None of the artwork that came up from my search were of the same caliber as my moose, so it looks like I'm safe. Remember that, as always, the idea is to have a mark that is not confusingly similar to another mark in the same class. Happy hunting!

New in the Patent and Trademark Center -- Gifts for the inventor in your life

The latest issue of Inventor's Digest has arrived at the Patent and Trademark Center. Just in time for the holiday season, this month's issue has a feature about gifts for inventors. They make a compelling argument for the importance of having a benchtop injection molder (make your own prototypes). They also review some books, games, software, and other fun stuff like the Magical Thinking Hat, which I like to imagine every patent examiner wearing while they examine applications.

The magazine is currently on display in the Patent and Trademark Center at the Main Library.

Software and business method patents are on the rocks

On Thursday,the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled against Bernard Bilski, a man whose patent for a method of reducing risk in commodities trading was ruled invalid by the Board of Patent Appeals. For Bilski, this means that he only has one more place to bring his appeal (the Supreme Court). For the rest of us, this establishes a much more narrow interpretation of patentability for software and business method patents.

Software and business method, popular with internet companies, came into vogue after the 1998 State Street Bank case in which the court ruled that any method that had "useful, concrete and tangible results" could qualify for a patent. With the Bilski ruling, there's a new patentability test in town -- "machine-or-transformation." For a software or business method patent to be legit, it must now be either attached to some machine or device or it must transform something into a different state.

There's a pretty good summary at the Patent Law Blog here. Here's a shorter summary from Reuters.