Promote the Progress
Blogging worldwide patent law and policy

• Special price on new FirstPage Weekly service for Promote the Progress readers
  Since launching our innovative FirstPage Reports(tm) on PatentFizz a couple weeks ago, we've received some wonderful feedback from our customers. Many have told us that the Reports are scratching an itch they've had for awhile - the need for an easy to generate overview document for their patent projects. Customers are using the Reports on everything from patent searches and clearance investigations to due diligence reviews and patent intelligence systems.
  
  Now I'd like to extend a special offer to Promote the Progress readers on a new service based on FirstPage Reports.
  
  Soon, we'll announce our new FirstPage Weekly(tm) service that will generate and deliver a FirstPage Report based on a customer's search particulars each and every week. This weekly service offers an effective and efficient tool for delivering patent-based intelligence to your entire team.
  
  Our beta testers are using this new service to:
  
  -monitor the patents and applications that publish under a firm's name each week
  -monitor the patent activity of a competitor or series of competitors
  -monitor the development of a client's (or your own) patent portfolio
  -keep the business team up to date on the patent activity of the company
  -monitor a particular technology, by keyword and/or USPTO class number
  
  You can download a sample Weekly report at the following URL:
  http://patentfizz.com/pdf/fp/samples/fpr_kmob_patents_110607.pdf
  
  Customers of this new service will receive a FirstPage Report based on their search particulars each and every week. We can deliver Reports on Tuesday (issued patents only), Thursday (published applications only), both of those days, or on Friday (both patents and applications in a single Report).
  
  Our pricing structure is simple:
  
  $5/week/search - no matter the delivery schedule you select.
  
  During this pre-launch special, Promote the Progress readers can get a full year of the FirstPage Weekly service for $100 - a discount of 50% on the yearly price that will be announced on PatentFizz soon.
  
  To take advantage of this offer, just send an e-mail message with the following information to orders@patentfizz.com:
  
  1. E-mail address to which the Reports should be sent
  2. The search to be conducted each week (if you're not familiar with PTO search strings, just tell us what you're looking for and we'll work with you to generate an appropriate search string)
  3. Your preferred delivery schedule (Tuesdays, Thursdays, both of those days, or Fridays; Note that this doesn't affect the price, and can always be changed later)
  4. Payment preference - tell us if you'd like to pay by credit card, paypal, or to be invoiced for the charge. We'll follow up with particulars later
  5. Mention that you saw this post on Promote the Progress
  
  We'll confirm your order and start issuing your FirstPage Weekly this week.
  
  Oh...and here's the best part. If you set up an order now, you'll enjoy the discounted rates on all future orders, too (most beta testers have asked for more Weekly Reports once they see the first few).
  
  Thanks again for your continued support and interest in my projects. If you have any questions about this new service or this offer, please send an e-mail to orders@patentfizz.com.
  
  
• PatentFizz - Generate a FirstPage Report directly from your USPTO search results
  

  Last week on PatentFizz, we rolled out some great improvements to our FirstPage Reports product, which gives you a single .pdf document containing the first page of every patent document in your project.

  On Friday, we announced a significant improvement to the 'user-friendliness' of the ordering process. Now, you can copy your USPTO search results and paste them directly into the Report order form. No matter the search, just copy everything from the results listing and paste it into the order form. The script will extract the numbers for every utility, design, and reissue patent - as well published applications - in the listing, and give you a link that lets you immediately download your Report.

  You can read more about this great new feature in this Fizzure post. And this screencast will help you appreciate the simplicity of it.

  This new feature, we think, will give you a whole new way to work with USPTO search results.

  Wondering how folks are using our FirstPage Reports? Read this post. Ready to order your own, or perhaps try the free 5 document version?

• New Rules Injunction - A serious wound to the newly activist and arrogant Patent and Trademark Office
  

  Our Patent and Trademark Office has taken a decidedly activist bent over recent years, single-handedly elevating itself from patent system administrator to patent policy maker. Today's injunction against the new rules is the first serious wound inflicted on this new animal, and now we must all wait to see if it's a mortal one...or a mere flesh wound that might, in the long run, make the beast stronger.

  Responsible activism would probably be welcome. No one disputes that the Office has serious backlog and quality issues that must be addressed. The patent community - all sides of it - would no doubt welcome carefully planned and fully contemplated changes to the administrative process that are designed to increase efficiency and quality. Indeed, this is the pipe dream many stakeholders bought into years ago when lending support to a significant fee increase.

  But, unfortunately, the Office has seemingly decided that its role in our patent system is much greater than it actually is. Placing limits on an applicant's ability to protect his or her fully disclosed invention is the province of Congress and the democratic process, not that of the regulators and notice and comment rulemaking. This is especially true when the explanation offered by the Office for the need for the rules is the fabled 'continuation abuse' and not the old-reliable problem of the application backlog.

  Making matters worse, the attitude of the Office during this nearly two year affair has been nothing short of brash and arrogant. From the early "you'll have to sue us" comments regarding the Office's authority to limit continuation filings to the final decision that dropped the biggest patent prosecution deadline since the GATT date squarely on Halloween - a holiday celebrated immediately after 'normal' business hours, not in the morning - the Office has repeatedly shown a new air of arrogance to the patent community. The end result will likely be - and probably already is - an evaporation of the sense of partnership that seemed to exist just a few years ago. Pity.

  The new attitude shows itself even today - at the time of writing this post - nearly two and a half hours after the first blog post on the issuance of the injunction, the Office still has not put any information regarding the injunction on its website. Surely the administration knew an injunction was a possibility (unless the arrogance runs so deep that they couldn't fathom the possibility of a loss). Surely they knew that a surge of deadline-inspired filings was coming (and already in process). Surely they appreciated the fact that every minute, on this day, was critical. Surely they didn't mean to shirk their administrative responsibility to disseminate information relating to the patent prosecution process. Surely they weren't going for political effect when they chose to talk to the Wall Street Journal before talking to their