The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has proposed patent fee adjustments in a notice of proposed rulemaking published on September 30, 2016. Comments on the fee adjustments must be received on or before December 2, 2016.
The proposal includes:
- Major increases to Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) trial fees, such as:
- Inter Partes Review fees from $23,000 to $30,500;
- Similar fee increases for Post-Grant and Covered Business Method Reviews Request fees;
- Moderate large entity fee increase for utility patent applications (filing, search and examination) and moderate excess claim fee increases for applications with greater than 3 independent claims or greater than 20 dependent claims; similar fee increases for small and micro entities;
- Moderate large entity fee increase for design patent filing, search, and examination fee rates; and
- New fee for sequence listing submissions of > 300 MB ($1000) and > 800 MB ($10,000).
The USPTO Press Release is available here.
The Federal Register Notice is available here.
Additional Commentary is available here.
Summary By: Robert Dewald