Both the Patently Obvious blog and Promote the Progress blog have articles covering the current patent bill which has USPTO fees provisions.
One of the interesting things is the creation of a three-tiered filing fee: filing fee, search fee, and examination fee. Hmmm..seeing a trend here. A few years ago they added a “publication fee.” Thus, if this bill becomes law, within a handful of years we will have gone from: filing fee ($770) + issue fee ($1300) = $2070 (for the sake of comparison using current fee amounts) to the proposed filing fee ($300) + search fee ($500) + examination fee ($200) + publication fee ($300) + issue fee ($1400) = $2700.
Next year I hear that they will be adding a “filing receipt stamping fee,” “file wrapper wrapping fee” and “patent ribbon curling fee.”
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