In order to enter the appropriate quantity of documents that are subject to the $170 document size fee, you first need to determine which documents are subject to the document size fees, and which document size fees are applicable.
The document size fees are only applicable to non-patent documents. U.S. patents, U.S. patent application publications, published international patent applications, and foreign patents and patent application publications, are all patent documents, which are not subject to the document size fees. Translations of non-English language patent documents are also not subject to the document size fees. In addition, non-patent documents having 20 pages or less are not subject to the document size fees.
Non-patent documents having 21 – 50 pages are subject to a $170 document size fee per document, pursuant to 37 CFR 1.20(k)(3)(i). Non-patent documents having greater than 50 pages are, in addition, subject to a $280 document size fee for each additional 50-page increment, or a fraction thereof, per document, pursuant to 37 CFR 1.20(k)(3)(ii).
The $280 document size fee for each additional 50-page increment, or a fraction thereof, will not be pro-rated. For example, if a request for supplemental examination included a 51-page non-patent document and a 99-page non-patent document, the same amount of document size fees would be due for each document: $170 for pages 21-50, and $280 for a fraction of an additional 50-page increment (one page in the case of the 51-page document, and 49 pages in the case of the 99-page document), resulting in a total of $450 ($170 + $280) for each document, or $900 ($450 + $450) for both documents.
Blank pages will be counted. The Office will use an automatic page counter that will not subtract blank pages from the total page count for the non-patent document.
Example: A request for supplemental examination includes eight documents: two U.S. patents, one U.S. patent application publication, one published international patent application, one Japanese published application, two journal articles, and a court document. The Japanese published application is not in the English language. For this reason, the request also includes a ninth document, which is a 22-page translation of the Japanese published application. The first journal article is 20 pages long, the second journal article is 25 pages long, and the court document is 50 pages long.
In this example, the U.S. patents, U.S. patent application publication, published international patent application, and the Japanese published application and its 22-page translation, are all patent documents, and are not subject to the document size fees. The 20-page journal article, which has 20 pages or less, is also not subject to the document size fees. In addition, there are no non-patent documents having greater than 50 pages. Therefore, there are no non-patent documents subject to the $280 document size fee pursuant to 37 CFR 1.20(k)(3)(ii).
There are only two documents which are subject to the $170 document size fee for non-patent documents which have 21 – 50 pages: the 25-page journal article and the 50-page court document. The document size fees for these documents should be calculated as follows:
25-page journal article | 50-page court document | Total Quantity | |
| 21-50 pages ($170 fee) | 1 | 1 | 2 |
In this example, the number”2” should be entered into the box labeled “Quantity” for the number of documents subject to the $170 fee for non-patent documents having 21 – 50 pages. The total amount due for document size fees in this example is $340 ($170 x 2).
For further information regarding document size fees and for an additional example, see information on how a document size fee is calculated for a non-patent document having more than 50 pages.