Jon Dudas became Acting Under Secretary of Commerce for Intellectual
Property and Acting Director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark
Office (USPTO) on January 12, 2004. Dudas, who takes his post
under the succession provisions of the 1999 American Inventors
Protection Act, comes to the job with over a decade of experience
in intellectual property law and management.
As a private practitioner in the early 1990s, Dudas had a significant
intellectual property practice that included extensive trademark
and copyright work. During his six years as Counsel to the Subcommittee
on Courts and Intellectual Property, and Staff Director and Deputy
General Counsel for the House Committee on the Judiciary--the
birthplace of all federal intellectual property statutory law--he
guided enactment of major patent, trademark and copyright policy,
including the most sweeping revisions to American patent law
since 1952, the 1999 American Inventors Protection Act, and the
passage of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, the 1998 law
implementing two landmark international treaties protecting creative
works in the digital age. Dudas was also instrumental in the
passage of the 1996 Trademark Anti-Counterfeiting Consumer Protection
Act, a law making it more difficult for seized counterfeit merchandise
to re-enter the consumer marketplace.
During his two-years as USPTO’s Deputy Under Secretary
and Director, Jon Dudas was directly involved in guiding the
operations of the $1.2 billion, 7,000-employee agency and was
pivotal in the creation of the USPTO’s 21st Century Strategic
Plan. Under Dudas’ leadership, quality will continue to
be the USPTO mantra. Current and prospective patent examiners
and managers, as well patent attorneys and agents, will be tested
to ensure they have the requisite knowledge, skills, and abilities
to produce top quality examination results. Quality assurance
tools will be used throughout the patent and trademark examination
process. And, as a final administrative guarantee of patent quality,
a more sophisticated post grant review of patents will be implemented.
Completing the agency’s transition to e-government is
another Dudas priority. By year’s end the complete trademark
process, including foreign trademark filings under the Madrid
Protocol, will be automated. Today, over 65% of trademark applications
are filed electronically, and trademark customers can electronically
determine the status of pending trademarks, do a preliminary
pre-filing search, access general information and obtain weekly
information on published marks. Patent applications are now available
to the public on line, offering valuable early notice of the
state-of-the art in technology. The Image File Wrapper (IFW),
USPTO’s official patent application record in electronic
format, is operational and is effectively supplanting the outdated
and inefficient 200-year-old paper-based system. More than 350,000
applications have been scanned into the system, and 1800 patent
examiners are now using IFW exclusively.
Dudas continues to work with members of Congress to enact the
Administration’s funding proposal supporting the strategic
plan. Enactment of the new fee schedule is critical to the success
of the plan and approval is expected soon after Congress returns.
Promoting American commerce abroad by harmonizing patent and
trademark administration and policy is also high among the Dudas
priorities. During the Bush years, the USPTO has become a major
force in the global economy, receiving broad support of the international
IP community for its strategic plan. Jon Dudas will continue
to work internationally on agreements to eliminate costly duplication
of effort in processing patents and trademarks, and to further
a more harmonized, quality-based intellectual property system.
(12Jan 2004) |
