Patent Law

On September 19, 2009, Oleg Zaitsev filed his patent application directed to a computer-hardware implemented anti-virus system.  Zaitsev included a petition for accelerated examination along with pre-examination search results and an examination support document explaining the validity of the drafted claims.

In a December 10, 2009 telephonic interview, the applicant (through his attorney) agreed to add an additional limitation into the independent claims via examiner amendment. On December 17, 2009, the examiner from Art Unit 3685 issued a notice of allowance. The patent then issued February 2, 2010.

The less-than-three-month notice of allowance is especially important since patent applications from AU 3685 have an average pre-issuance pendency of over 5.5 years.

See Patent No. 7,657,941.

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The 2010 patent with the earliest application date is No. 7,673,565.  That application was filed in 1977 and is directed toward infra-red proximity fuzes for missiles. The US Department of Defense had stalled the processing of the application through a secrecy order.

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The 66,000 patents issued Jan 10, 2010 – April 27, 2010 had an average prosecution pendency of 3.8 years from filing or 4.8 years from the earliest US priority date. For applications with at least one non-provisional US parent application, the average pendency was 7.0 yeasr from the earliest US priority date.