The United States Patent and Trademark Office (PTO or USPTO) is an agency in the United States Department of Commerce that provides patent and trademark protection to inventors and businesses for their inventions and corporate and product identification.
The PTO, currently based in the Crystal City area of Arlington, Virginia, will complete a move to consolidated offices in Alexandria, Virginia by 2005.
Since 1991, the office has been fully funded by fees charged for processing patents and trademarks.
Each year, the PTO issues thousands of patents to companies and individuals all around the world. As of August 2004, the PTO has issued nearly seven million patents.
The X-Patents (the first 10,000 issued between 1790 and 1836) were destroyed by a fire; less than 3,000 of those have been recovered and re-issued with numbers ending in "X" to distinguish them from those issued after the fire.
The current head of the USPTO is Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual Property Jon W. Dudas.
In order to become either, an applicant must demonstrate to the USPTO's statisfaction certain scientific and technical competencies and then pass a difficult USPTO-administered examination called the USPTO Registration Examination, which covers the voluminous regulations and procedures that govern USPTO practice.
To underscore an earlier post, the USPTO is considering enacting a rule that would require Applicants to submit structural data on chemical compounds and biological molecules in electronic format.
The USPTO has announced that its Web Patent Database, known as PatFT, may be unavailable from 4:00 PM EST on April 1st until 4:00 PM EST on April 2nd due to a planned physical relocation of the USPTO contractor's data center.
According to the program, disclosed documents will be preserved by the USPTO for two years after their receipt, and then destroyed unless referred to in a separate letter in a related patent application filed within the two year period.
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