USPTO Urges Congress To Amend Select AIA Petition Rules
In its report to Congress regarding the America Invents Act (AIA), the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) urged Congress to amend some rules for AIA reviews. The USPTO report was a requirement of the 2011 AIA, due four years after the AIA was enacted. One of the changes the USPTO requests is for Congress to allow companies to join into one proceeding their own AIA petitions that have been filed separately. Under the current AIA rules, this action is not expressly permitted and has caused some divide among the judges on the Patent Trial and Appeal Board. In the report, the USPTO remarked, "Making the change would encourage efficiency by enabling one proceeding to include more issues, which would be less burdensome on the parties and the USPTO."
Another adjustment the USPTO recommends is to allow for a timely correction of information related to the identification of real parties in interest. As it stands now, the AIA requires a petitioner challenging patents to identify all of the real parties in interest in the proceeding. The penalty for not identifying all the interested parties correctly is the petition is thrown out. The USPTO told Congress that the current rules are too strict, and that a "statutory change is necessary to avoid situations where petitions are denied based on good-faith, inadvertent errors in identifying all real parties in interest."
