Intellectual Property Law

Business Method - Reverse Auction by USPTO.

By thomason

Your USPTO needs copy paper, and it solicits bids in a notice in FedBizOpps.  But, it is not a lowest, when-opened bid solicitation.  Rather, the Commerce Dept. uses a reverse auction method, as stated in the solicitation:                                            ”United States Patent and Trademark Office intends to conduct an online competitive reverse auction to be facilitated by the third-party reverse auction provider, [which] has developed an online, anonymous, browser based application to conduct the reverse auction. An Offeror may submit a series of pricing bids, which descend in price during the specified period of time for the aforementioned reverse auction. The United States Patent and Trademark Office is taking this action in an effort to improve both vendor access and awareness of requests and the agency’s ability to gather multiple, competed, real-time bids.”                                             With its ‘other hand’ the USPTO has been issuing patents on methods for conducting online competitive reverse auctios, such as USP 7,376,593 or 7,571,131 or 7,412,412.  Perhaps the copy paper is needed for office actions on these sorts of business methods.

Full post as published by ISinIP on November 24, 2009 (boomark / email).