Cassis Subscriber Notice

The recently enacted "American Inventor Protection Act of 1999" (AIPA) legislation will have a significant impact on the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and its customers. Pre-Grant Publication (PGPub), or the publication of patent applications prior to their being issued as patents, is a major part of the new law. Utility and plant patent applications are subject to PGPub; design and provisional applications are not included. Unless the inventor verifies that he/she is not applying in a country other than the U.S. and specifically requests that the application not be published, all applications will be published 18months after the filing date. The law goes into effect on 2000 November 29. The first applications are anticipated to be published beginning 2001 March 29.

This will create an entirely new set of documents, one that is anticipated to ultimately be many times larger than the number of granted patents. These documents will only be published in electronic format, not in paper. There will not be a separate Official Gazette for applications nor will they be included in the Official Gazette.

Patent application publications will be searchable and incorporated into current electronic search tools to make it possible to conduct just one search for both granted patents and application documents. The applications will be added to the existing searchable Cassis patent products, including Patents ASSIGN, Patents BIB, and Patents CLASS. The application publications will also be accessible via the Full-Text Patent Database on the USPTO Web site, as well as the USPTO EAST and WEST search systems. A new document delivery DVD-ROM product with patent application publications, USAApp, will be added to the Cassis Series of optical discs. USAApp will be similar to USAPat and USAMark and, like these products, will use the DocDW retrieval software.

For more information about PGPub implementation, visit the AIPA page on the USPTO Web site at www.uspto.gov/web/offices/dcom/olia/aipa/index.htm. A FAQ is currently being developed for the Web site and should be available soon.

2000 November 6