Patent office boosts fees for filings and challenges

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has revamped its fee schedule for the first time in over four years, raising most patent fees by roughly 10%. PTO says the increases, which will take effect on Jan. 16, 2018, will help cover the office’s operational costs, reduce its backlog, and grow a reserve balance.

The most significant change is for inter partes review, the widely used proceeding that allows alleged infringers and others to challenge the validity of an existing patent. Petitioners before PTO’s Patent Trial & Appeal Board will have to pay fees totaling $30,500 for such a review. That’s up from $23,000 under the current fee schedule, a 33% increase.

“These fee adjustments seek to more closely align fees and costs,” PTO says. The cost of challenging patent validity before the appeals board will remain “significantly less than court proceedings for most stakeholders,” the office adds.

The increases in patent application filing, search, and examination fees are smaller. For a business with more than 500 employees, the “large entity” filing fee for a utility patent will rise $20 to $300; the search fee will go up $60 to $660; and the examination fee will increase $40 to $760.

For design patents, the large-entity filing fee increases $20 to $200; the search fee will rise $40 to $160; and the examination fee will go up $140 to $600.

A utility patent protects the way an article is used and works, while a design patent protects the way an article looks.