I drafted a patent application, filed it, and received a notice of allowance 15 months from the date of filing. It was allowed before it published. The application was allowed around 40 days after the decision on the petition was received.
Impressive results from the experimental program at the USTPO.
And no, the claims are not ultra-narrow. :)
The United States Patent and Trademark Office has announced a pilot program for green technologies, including greenhouse gas reduction, environmental quality, energy conservation, development of renewable energy resources, or greenhouse gas emission reduction.
The requirements for this program can be found on page 2 of the attached PDF.
This program will allow an applicant with an application pertaining to green technologies to petition to advance the application out of turn for examination. This program began on December 8, 2009 and will run for 12 months so petitions must be filed before December 9, 2010.
The Whitehouse has announced its intent to appoint David Kappos as head of the USPTO.
A little over one year ago, IBM’s IP arm announced that it co-founded a patent pool called the Eco-Patents Commons. Kappos said, “[t]here’s no reason that environmentally sustainable activity cannot be commercially advantageous,” according to a CNET article posted last year.
The Wikipedia’s wiki site for patent pools information is http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_pool.
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