America Invents IP Blog

It now appears that “Microentity fees” were just a gimmick concept of Sen. IBM Leahy to mislead his colleagues into thinking there was something in this bill favoring individual inventors. Now that the bill has passed, those statutorily required Microentity fee reductions which the law said were to be effective immediately upon passage have been instead delayed for “a year or two” for review and regulatory rulemaking. You can be fairly sure that means they will now be killed or minimized, which is apparently part of why IBM Kappos was given power to “adjust” fees. You see, IBM Kappos has raised essentially all PTO fees 15% so small business can help pay for transitioning to a rich man’s game and has postponed the implementation of microentity fees while he “studies” how to implement them, even though no study is needed at all. All that is needed is to read the statute and to divide small entity fees by 2. So, the most logical conclusion is that they are being delayed to try to kill them because they don’t favor IBM. This seems all the more clear since such delay does not apply to fee increases for small inventors, which are already in place, or to the “fast tracks for big cats” (prioritized exam) program which IBM wanted implemented immediately so it could bypass all the small guys and move to the front of the line and which therefore was enacted immediately. Those will be limited to the first 10,000 to request and pay for such priority, and it appears IBM and other big businesses are well on their way to seeing that those 10,000 are used up by them quickly so none will be available for small businesses. IBM Kappos says he may open up a few more for small businesses (translated for small businesses like IBM, GE, Samsung, Toshiba, etc, since truly small business can’t afford them.)