Current legislative information affecting the USPTO, including testimony before Congress, other relevant congressional hearings on intellectual property issues, USPTO reports, and active IP-related legislation can be found at the links below. For additional information, contact the USPTO’s Office of Governmental Affairs.
Congressional hearings
Hearings concerning the USPTO and intellectual property policy in the 116th Congress.
Recent USPTO studies and reports
This four-year plan serves as the roadmap for the USPTO’s future, identifying strategic goals that focus the office’s future efforts on issuing predictable, reliable, and high-quality IP rights; aligning patent and trademark examination capacity with current and projected workloads; modernizing information technology; enhancing the customer experience; promoting IP rights abroad; monitoring and helping address dynamic IP issues in Congress and the courts; maintaining a sustainable funding model; and developing IP policy.
This report studied the impact of recent actions undertaken by the USPTO to bring greater predictability and certainty to the determination of patent eligibility in the technology areas most affected by the 2014 Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank International U.S. Supreme Court decision. It concluded that uncertainty about determinations of patent subject matter eligibility in the first action stage of patent examination for Alice-affected technologies decreased by 44% over the first year following the 2019 publication of USPTO guidance.
In this report, the USPTO (1) identifies publicly available data on the number of patents annually applied for and obtained by women, minorities, and veterans, (2) identifies publicly available data on the benefits of increasing the number of patents applied for and obtained by women, minorities, and veterans and the small businesses owned by them, and (3) provides legislative recommendations for how to promote the participation of women, minorities, and veterans in entrepreneurship activities and increase the number of women, minorities, and veterans who apply for and obtain patents.
The USPTO issued this report as required by the Study of Underrepresented Classes Chasing Engineering and Science Success (SUCCESS) Act of 2018. More information on the SUCCESS Act can be found on the USPTO’s SUCCESS Act page.
In this report, the USPTO identifies the trends and characteristics of U.S. women inventors named on U.S. patents granted from 1976 through 2016. It found that while female inventorship is rising, women inventors still made up only 12% of all inventors on patents granted in 2016.
