TPAC met last Friday. I was waiting for the USPTO to post the full slide deck, but that hasn’t happened yet and I wanted to share these very important data points and slides. See some of the most important slides that I captured below.
TLDR: All of the following are rising considerably : Applications, revenues, examination pendency, USPTO employment, scams and bad faith actors.
My quick take aways from the meeting:
- pendency for review of new applications and most other steps in the application process will continue to rise before they improves given the influx of new filings
- USPTO likely to hire more examiners (50 starting next month)
- given the rise in revenues, more money will flow into IT improvements (after cuts last year); however, the nature of the specific improvements the public will see and when is unclear to me
- filings from China account for a huge percentage of the overall increase
- TTAB filing increases have moderated some lately, but they always lag a year or more; given the increased applications and record number of registrations, a rise in TTAB filings seem inevitable to me in the near future
- the vast majority (3/4) of applications come from applicants who submit 10 or less applications
- filings were down just before the the pandemic and dropped even more in March and April of 2020, but ever since June have been at record levels, fueled by economy, filings from China, and a rush to the beat the fee increases in December
- enactment of the Trademark Modernization Act, due to the timeframe allowed, will provide less public comment opportunities than usual; but USPTO expects to publish proposed rulemaking in May and will see comment on it
