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At the USPTO headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia, Commissioner for Patents Vaishali Udupa recently sat down with Kiesha Bryant, Director of Technology Center 3700 (mechanical engineering, manufacturing, gaming, and medical devices/processes) and a hiring director at the agency, to discuss the hiring of patent examiners.
Since I began my tenure over two years ago, the USPTO has worked feverishly to increase American innovation and entrepreneurship.
Did you know U.S. veteran-owned businesses generate $1 trillion annually, employing 3.6 million people? As part of President Biden’s commitment to veterans, military families, and caregivers, the Commerce Department’s U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is at the forefront of providing intellectual property (IP) and entrepreneurship guidance to service members on active duty, military spouses, National Guardsmen, Reservists, veterans, and military family members around the world.
Since the moment I was sworn in as Director of this great agency two years ago, I have been guided by the conviction that we must open the doors of opportunity in the innovation community to everyone, not just a select few. Only when every inventor and entrepreneur has an equal chance to bring their new ideas and products to the global marketplace, on a level playing field, does our nation truly thrive.
Today, based on the exceptional public feedback we’ve received, we announced our Inventorship Guidance for AI-Assisted Inventions in the Federal Register. The guidance, which is effective on February 13, 2024, provides instructions to examiners and stakeholders on how to determine whether the human contribution to an innovation is significant enough to qualify for a patent when artificial intelligence (AI) also contributed. The guidance embraces the use of AI in innovation and provides that AI-assisted inventions are not categorically unpatentable.
Since the start of my tenure as Director in spring 2022, protecting and enforcing intellectual property (IP) rights in China has been an essential part of our agency efforts to strengthen the global IP system. U.S. businesses operating in China regularly cite insufficient protection and enforcement of IP as a top concern, and the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative has placed China on its "priority watch" list for over a decade, detailing a long list of IP concerns reported by U.S. businesses operating in China.
As we announced in September, as part of our modernization efforts to provide more extensible technology and functionality, the EFS-Web and Private Patent Application Information Retrieval (Private PAIR) tools are being retired after their decades of use as electronic filing and application management systems for our Patents customers.
