!081794 US & Japan sign patent agreement



    Today's Boston Globe reported that the US and Japan last Friday in
Wsahington signed an agreement dealing with patent practices.  No details
in the article on what was agreed to, though as I remeber from something
last fall, we were going to trade a patent term of 20 years from filing
in return for being able to file applications in English with the Japanese
Patent Office (with translation within three months).

    Some more news on the US/Japan patent accord.  From a New York Times
article.

    In letters of agreement, Japan agreed to greatly reduce the time for
determination on patent requests, allowing applications to be decided in a
maximum of three years.  Currently, the average review time is five years.
Japan also said it would do away with a provision that allows patents to
be legally challenged before they have been issued, as well as a requirement
of compulsory licensing of patents in some instances. Japan will also allow
foreign inventors to file their initial applications in English.

    In return, the United States will change provisions to have patent
applications published after 18 months, and that American patents will be
granted for a period of 20 years after the date of application, rather than
17 years after the date of issuance.

    Unfortunately for those who favor these reforms, the US/Japan agreement
require legislative action in both countries, approval of which is not
certain in either country.  While Congress has introduced legislation for
many of the provisions separately, acting on all of them or combining them
will take some time.

                              ====================

    I would like to comment on one contentious aspect of these discussions:
switching patent terms from 17 years from issuance to 20 years from filing.
There are many who are worried that this does a disservice to the individual
and small company inventors, and from what I hear, heated arguments in front
of Congressional committees.

    I recently completed a very large study of issued US software patents.
One statistic incidental to the main conclusions of the study was the average
number of months to process a software patent application.  1000 US software
patents from January 1994 to April 1994 were analyzed for the processing time
from filing date to issuing date.

			MONTHS   #
			------  ---
			06-09    27
			10-13    53
			14-17   112
			18-21   122
			22-25   140
			26-29   140
			30-33   121
			34-37   104

			38-41    71
			42-45    54
			46-49    26
			50-59    18
			 >60     12
			
The average processing time is 28 months.  About 20% take more than 3 years to
process.  Keep in mind that software patents are taking longer to process than
for most other technologies, so that the distribution for non-software patents
has a lower average and fewer patents taking more than 3 years.

But even for software patents, about 80% are issued within three years of
filing, so that it is irrelevant whether the term is 17 from issue or 20 from
filing.  For those patents taking longer than 3 years to process (including
about 10% using about 3 months more), giving examiners better tools for
processing patents, and better prior art capabilities, would probably hasten
processing these patents (many of which shouldn't be issued anyways based on
prior art and novelty) and bring them under the 3 year time period.

There are much bigger problems than the 17/20 year rule affecting the
patenting process, and people shouldn't waste time arguing over this issue,
especially if they don't gather statistics on patent processing.

Greg Aharonian
Internet Patent News Service