When a third-party challenges a patent holder’s monopoly, the USPTO reviews the case; however, a very small percentage of patents are revoked. And, even those revoked are later reinstated when the patent holder appeals the decision.

I read an article today about the USPTO’s decision to tentatively nullify four patents held by Gilead Sciences, which cover a drug that treats AIDS patients (San Jose Mercury News, January 24, 2008). A consumer advocacy group up the coast from Florida (in New York) called the Public Patent Foundation is the third-party challenger in this case, claiming Gilead’s patents are invalid, because they had publicly disclosed the technology behind the drug.

This brings up something I consistently counsel Florida patent seekers (and patent seekers everywhere) against. It is vitally important not to publicly disclose your idea–and in fact not to disclose it except under absolute necessity–before filing for a patent. The USPTO can, and certainly will, reject a patent application for an idea already in the public eye.

Now, I doubt that Gilead, having already secured their four patents, will have their patents revoked. (Even the Public Patent Foundation admits the unlikeliness of this.) And, Gilead, which earned $3.1 Billion in sales based on their patents, says they will “vigorously defend each and every claim.” With that big a business riding on it, I’m sure they will.

According to Patent and Trademark Office, “patent pendency is the period from the date when an application is filed until the date when a patent is issued or the application is abandoned”. PTO computes average pendency as the total number of months for all patents issued or abandoned over a particular period, divided by the total number of applications for that period. Patent pendency is a primary measure of the delay in the processing time in granting patents.

The period is the total period from the filing date of a regular patent application to the date of issuance as a patent. Even though the filing of a “Provisional” has “Patent Pending” status, no portion of the one year before the regular patent application is filed should be included in your pendency calculations.

It is calculated by simply taking out the average time taken in the prosecution of the set of issued patents (i.e. the time between filing and grant of the patent). Before making final calculation we have to look on the borderline cases (i.e. cases having too long or too short prosecution time). Too long prosecution time may be due to unnecessary delay from the applicant’s side, and such cases should be excluded from the calculations.

Patent pendency = Time lag between filing and grand of a patent

It is always better to take a bigger set of patents to calculate patent pendency for better answers.

Patents are good source of technology and competitive information and could be used for better actionable intelligence from text mining. A patent document consists of core information concerning a particular invention in a technology domain and the key elements, processes and methodology of the invention are vested in the title, abstract, summary, claims and detailed description of the preferred embodiments of the invention. Additionally, US class and an IPC class provides the key parameters of the invention. But, in case of US or IPC class, it is better to consider all the classes, not just the primary class to get better understanding of the invention. Thus, it is easy to run automation to generate actionable intelligence in a patent document.

For better automation and intelligence information collection, one has to consider the US and IPC class along with the key patent sections mentioned above, plus additional similar terms from the web. Also, it is better to have a good understanding of the subject and technologies around the domain.

Experts at Dolcera have been engaged in developing a model to extract text to generate actionable Intelligence. This model can be of very useful in analyzing large information set in short span of time.