The White House has announced that they intend to nominate David J. Kappos, currently manager of IBM's patent and trademark portfolio, for the manager position at the U.S. patent office.
That means a high probability that he gets the job, which would be good news for international technology companies with the U.S. as a key market.
The U.S. Patent Office has had problems for several years with backlogs and regulations that are not adapted to the market needs.
The U.S. Patent office has faced increasing criticism in recent years since the processing of patent applications has taken too long. In the current situation, the backlog is 770 000 patent applications and the process is time consuming. This creates considerable uncertainty in the market during the period of patent pending applications.
USA is the country where Swedish companies submit the most patent applications, according to the latest published comparable statistics. In 2007, Swedish companies turned in 3 164 patent applications to U.S. Patent office, compared with 2 733 to the European Patent office and 2 527 to the Swedish Patent and registration Office.
Cecilia Helland