Million Dollar Patent

In patent prosecution, the Patent Office fees are usually quite low when compared to the cost of hiring a patent attorney.  I’m predicting that the usual equation is not quite true for Angiotech International who was recently asked to pay $1.25 Million in application filing fees for a patent application having about 10,000 claims.  (File Attachment: Fee Due.pdf). 

As would be expected, the patentee quickly submitted an amended specification that cut the disclosure to three independent claims and 96 dependent ones — thus reducing its PTO bill to only two grand.

As Greg Aharonian noted, it is lucky that the applicant was a small entity — otherwise the fee would have been over $2,000,000. (Published Application)

Links:

• Brandon Rash’s Coverage (File History)
• Sander Gelsing’s Coverage (Noting that the Canadian filing fee would have been just $200).

Comments

[Mike Brown]

Interestingly, if you look at the case on public PAIR, they actually filed 13,305 claims, but the USPTO "only" charged them for 9,999 - it appears that the PTO computer overflows at 10,000.