The Enhanced Patent Quality Initiative and Search:  A Brief Time Line and Options Moving Forward INTRODUCTION Patent quality has been an issue for many years.  It used to confound me that a patent could be cancelled in a reexamination at the PTO but upheld and deemed infringed by the courts.  Famous examples of low quality...

Is Patent Quality Attainable? Introduction My name is Robert Grantham.  I’m a commercial searcher and I’ve been in the patent searching business for than a ¼ century.  A commercial searcher, once called a public searcher, conducts searches for multiple clients in a variety of industries.  I bring this up because the membership of PIUG is...

Is Prior Art Valuable Service? A Corollary to Searcher Certification INTRODUCTION The commercial patent industry, that is the legal part, is comprised of three different types of actor, each of whom individually makes substantive contributions to the pre-application, application, and post-grant patent process. Those actors are the patent lawyer, the patent agent, and the patent...