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As we wrote about recently here, Examiners continue to rely on the USPTO’s current guidance on the definiteness standard set forth by the Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (“Federal Circuit”) in In re Maatita, 900 F.3d 1369, 1377 (Fed. Cir. 2018), that ignores the Federal Circuit’s broader instruction—reasonable certainty is all that is required to satisfy the requirements of 35 U.S.C. § 112, not the specific type or quantities of views that the Applicant has chosen to use. Continue Reading Another Step Forward: Further Updates on In re Maatita and Design Definiteness

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has announced the rollout of DesignVision, an advanced AI‑powered image search tool now integrated into the examination system for U.S. design patent applications. According to the Official Gazette notice published July 16, 2025, DesignVision enables examiners to perform federated searches of U.S. and foreign industrial design and trademark databases—spanning over 80 registers—using only image inputs. Results are ranked by visual similarity, allowing faster and more precise prior art discovery. The notice clarifies that this tool is intended to augment existing textual search methods, not replace them.Continue Reading AI Search Tool Coming to Design Patent Examination

Expedited Patent Issuance

Starting May 13, 2025, the USPTO has begun accelerating the issuance of patents after the issue fee has been paid. Specifically, the duration between the Issue Notification and the Issue Date will be reduced to approximately two weeks instead of the current three-week time period. The USPTO has noted that it has been able to implement this improvement in view of its technology modernization efforts. More information on this update can be found at the USPTO’s website here.Continue Reading USPTO Expediting Design Patent Issuances and De-Expediting Design Examination

In 2024, design patent law encountered a couple of major changes: the implementation of a new design patent bar, and the upending of decades of obviousness law under 35 U.S.C. § 103 in view of the en banc United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit (CAFC)’s decision in LKQ Corporation v. GM Global Technology Operations LLC, which we discussed here. Looking back at last year’s design patent issuance statistics, we now take the time to determine whether, if at all, the issuance numbers of U.S. design patents were impacted by these changes. Continue Reading Recap of 2024 U.S. Design Patent Drama: Here’s What We Know Now

When there are fewer design elements in a design claim or when the individual elements of the design seem commonplace in isolation, it can be easy to overlook the inventive effort that went into developing a design. Rather than looking to the overall visual impression that those design elements provide as a whole, one can make the fatal error of ignoring a majority or the entirety of the design, considering it to be no more than an “abstract idea.”Continue Reading Sometimes Less is More: Patentability of “Simple” Designs

Like many patent owners or aspiring patent owners, at some point you may have found yourself in a situation where design protection was needed, but all you had was narrow utility protection. Perhaps a decision had been made years ago to forgo a design filing in favor of a utility application, and in retrospect, that decision was a costly mistake. Sure, your disclosure may have been robust and your drawings comprehensive, but the available claim scope is not as broad as you would like, and now a competitor is selling a product that looks a lot like your product but does not infringe any of your utility claims.Continue Reading While There is an Active Utility Application, There is Design Hope

The Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (“MPEP”) is the examination manual used internally at the United States Patent & Trademark Office (“USPTO”) to guide examiners in the process of examining patent applications. In practice, patent applicants frequently rely on the contents of the MPEP during patent prosecution to guide their arguments and hold examiners accountable to their legal obligations during patent examination.Continue Reading Recent Examination Manual Update Includes Guidance on Protection of Computer-Generated Designs

While obtaining a design patent is often quicker than obtaining a utility patent, current design patent application pendency is often still a lengthy period of time. Based on data released by the USPTO in July 2024 and shown below, over the previous year the average length of time from a design application filing date to the date that a first Office action was mailed was 16.7 months (Figure 1, below). In the month of July 2024, that average had crept up to 17.1 months. In the consumer product space especially, given the sometimes short shelf-life of a product, such a long examination pendency may not be suitable for a design patent applicant.Continue Reading Rocket Docket: Fast Track to Examination

Quarles & Brady Partner and editor-in-chief of the firm’s Protecting the Product design rights blog, James Aquilina, Partner Michael Piery, Associate Rachel Ackerman, and patent professionals Harrison Powell and Audrey Jacobson attended the 17th Annual USPTO Design Day on May 9, 2024 at the USPTO’s Headquarters in Alexandria, Virginia.Continue Reading RECAP – 17th Annual USPTO Design Day

Over the past two decades, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) has been working on a Design Law Treaty focused on aligning examination and procedural guidelines associated with what have historically been referred to as “industrial designs.” One main goal of the Design Law Treaty is to help designers in domestic and foreign jurisdictions obtain design protection faster, easier, and cheaper. In theory, the Design Law Treaty would help to streamline the registration formalities in jurisdictions that are signatories to the treaty and reduce the amount of “red tape” that comes with obtaining design protection across different jurisdictions.Continue Reading USPTO Request for Public Comments Regarding the WIPO Design Law Treaty