Remarkably poor timing by Mondaq!

IPBiz will cut and paste from this article by Lyrissa Di Fiore and Ivan Rajkovic on Mondaq DATED November 23, 2007, because it is a prime candidate to be sikahema'd:

Australia: US Adopts New Rules For Patent Examination



23 November 2007
Article by Lyrissa Di Fiore and Ivan Rajkovic
In an attempt to reduce the backlog of patent applications awaiting examination, the United States Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) has recently published new patent prosecution rules relating to:

continued examination and continuation application practice;
the number of claims allowable in a patent; and
related application (common claims) practice.

These new rules will take effect on 1 November 2007 and will be retroactively applied to pending US patent applications. Basically, the rules will restrict the number of "bites at the cherry" available to patent applicants – that is, they will effectively reduce the number of times a set of claims relating to a particular invention can be put before a US examiner. This constitutes the most significant change to USPTO prosecution practice in recent years and is likely to have a major impact on the patent strategy of players across all technologies.


[For those not familiar with the verb "sikahema," IPBiz coined the term to pay tribute to Vai Sikahema's famous, but vanished, op-ed [aka "Vai's View"] in August 2006 entitled "Rutgers is Wrong." When something you publish turns out to be wrong or stupid, you simply make it disapper. In some corners, this is done to people, see los desaparecidos.]