Recently in Trademark News Category

USPTO Releases New Five-Year Strategic Plan
Plan builds on record breaking progress in 2006

The Department of Commerce’s United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) released the agency’s “2007-2012 Strategic Plan,” which lays out goals and objectives to guide the agency in accomplishing its mission of fostering innovation and competitiveness by providing high quality and timely examination of patent and trademark applications, guiding domestic and international intellectual property policy and delivering intellectual property information worldwide.

The plan builds upon the record-breaking progress the USPTO made during fiscal year 2006 in the areas of quality production, electronic filing and processing, teleworking and hiring.

The Strategic Plan has three complementary strategic goals: (1) optimizing patent quality and timeliness; (2) optimizing trademark quality, and (3) improving intellectual property protection and enforcement domestically and abroad. The plan outlines approaches toward attaining these goals, articulates underlying challenges and opportunities, and identifies steps that can be taken toward implementation. It provides a framework for continuing to make measurable quality improvements, reducing patent application pendency, increasing the percentage of patent applications filed electronically and improving worldwide intellectual property expertise.

The five-year plan also has a management goal of achieving organizational excellence. As part of this goal, the agency will strive to become an employer of choice with a culture of high performance and to enhance organizational communication, prerequisites to achieving the strategic goals focused on the agency’s core mission.

The plan is the outcome of a collaborative process that included input from the public, stakeholders and employees. A draft Strategic Plan was released in September 2006 and comments were solicited. Through public comment, employee focus sessions and the input of the Patent Public Advisory Committee and the Trademark Public Advisory Committee, the plan’s ambitious goals are more clearly stated.  Further, the final plan seeks to outline transformational strategies that balance the short-term needs of today’s applicants with strategic changes needed to deal the increasing complexity and numbers of patent applications.

Under Secretary Dudas Addresses U.S. Chamber Intellectual Property Summit in Beijing and Also Meets with Heads of Chinese IP Offices
Meetings further deepen U.S. cooperation with Chinese IP Offices and speech outlines what governments are doing to address exponential worldwide growth in patent applications and intellectual property theft

The U.S. Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property (IP) and Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Jon Dudas recently spoke at the Global Forum on Intellectual Property Rights Protection and Innovation in Beijing where he stressed the need for strong intellectual property protection and enforcement to foster innovation and wealth creation. The meeting in late March was hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and China’s Council for the Promotion of International Trade.

This was Mr. Dudas’ seventh trip to China to work on IP issues. He used the opportunity to meet with representatives of Chinese IP-related agencies to further bilateral cooperation on finding solutions to IP protection and enforcement challenges. Mr. Dudas met with Commissioner Tian Lipu of the State Intellectual Property Office (SIPO), China's Patent Office for their second heads-of-offices meeting. The USPTO and SIPO have witnessed dramatic growth in patent application filings, and last year, the two agencies signed a work plan of strategic cooperation intended to reduce the workloads of both agencies and to further cooperation. Under the work plan, the USPTO has implemented an examiner exchange program and initiated an automation expert group meeting, as well as providing training to SIPO examiners and managers on biotechnology patent examination, examiner training and certification, and quality assurance.  Cooperative programs planned for the future include training of SIPO examiners at the USPTO Patent Academy, a workshop on traditional knowledge, genetic resources, and folklore, and an IP enforcement program.