Last Friday, the USPTO issued a? press release? describing its performance as the best on record in over 20 years. The press release summarizes it annual report? and included this chart:

??? I am not sure why the USPTO chooses to emphasize this. Similar to a judge’s desired impartiality (e.g, she is not supposed to care who wins), the USPTO should not care whether you get a patent, as long as the USPTO “gets it right.” Perhaps it is a response to some of the recent criticisms that the USPTO is letting too many worthwhile patents through. Most comments like this I read do not provide many details as to how we know what a worthwhile patent is or how we determine the “correct” number of patents.

Some other numbers from the report: the USPTO did not meet its target for patent average first action pendency – Target is 22 months (nearly 2 years before you learn anything substantive on your application) and actual is 22.6 months. Being an average, there are many of you upwards of that 22.6 month number, sometimes significantly above.

The patent average total pendency (months) has a target of 31.3 months and actual average total pendency is 31.1 months. While the US Examiners I work with are generally very good, it is interesting that the USPTO would emphasize a “record year” that includes the lowest allowance rate.

The Patent Statute states that an inventor is entitled to a patent, unless… The unless being various items that the USPTO must demonstrate that the inventor is, in fact, NOT entitled to their patent. The burden is on the USPTO, and given a decrease in allowance rate may suggest that the USPTO is working even harder. From a perspective of a person in the trenches representing solo and small start-up inventors, I am not sure what all of this means. Stay tuned for more analysis.

? Other interesting data from the report: total US applications filed in 2006 increased to 443,652 from 409,532 (number of provisional applications filed increased from 11,753 to 121,307). While the allowance rate dropped, the absolute number of allowances increased to 186,593 from 182,254.

Just to let you know where you stand, the total number of pending applications now exceeds 1,000,000 applications (1,003,884) versus 885,002 a year ago). The number of total applications pending has increased each year since 1986 (there were only 207,774 that year).

As a group, residents of California are the most prolific in filing applications by a huge margin – in 2005 (the last year data is available), patent applications filed by residents of California were 52,401, followed by Texas at 13,903, then New York at 13,482, then Washington at 10,149.

For non-US residents, residents of Japan filed the most (73, 250), then Germany (21,598), then the Republic of Korea (16,643), and Canada (9,114).

Our government agencies were busy – at the time an application was issued, 287 were owned by the Navy, 187 by the Army, and 108 by the HEW/HHS.?  NASA was fourth at 88, followed by the Air Force at 58.

The USPTO did not release much information about contested cases (e.g., Appeals and Interferences). We do know that the number of Appeals pending at the end of FY2005 was 882, that 3,349 new cases were filed in FY2006, and that the total number of cases pending at the end of FY2006 increased to 1,357.

Stay tuned