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The Entire Delay in Posting this Post Was Unintentional

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Today I came across a patent which had been revived 3,140 days (!) after it had gone abandoned. This made me curious what the record was for amount of time from abandonment to petition for revival. Since my blog post for this week has also been unintentionally delayed, I decided it was a fitting topic.

The Record for Longest “Unintentional” Delay

To calculate the record, I looked at all applications filed since 1990 that had an abandonment followed by a petition to revive. I then sorted them by amount of time from abandonment to petition. The record I arrived at is 5,447 days (almost 15 years for those who were promised there would be no math).

The apparent record holder is application number 08/259,859 for “Check Verification System.” The application went abandoned April 1, 1996 for failure to respond to an office action mailed July 5, 1995. It was then revived by a petition filed on March 2, 2010 and subsequently issued as patent 7,899,234 on March 1, 2011 (a continuation also later issued as a patent).

As an added bonus, the patent and its child patent both appear to have been asserted in the Eastern District of Texas (Lyssa Networks, LLC v. VeriCheck, Inc.)

Petitions to Revive are No Longer Based on How Much Money You Have

Application 08/259,859 was revived based on “unintentional” delay. Many readers will remember that before 2014 there also used to be another option: “unavoidable” delay. It was really stupid. Petitions for”unvoidable” delay were relatively cheap but the standard was very high. Petitions for “unintentional” delay were expensive but granted basically as a matter of course. So pretty much whether you could revive your application depended on how much money you had. Moving to the single “unintentional” standard, and making it affordable, was definitely one of the patent law changes that they got right in the past decade. Now, if they would just stop favoring deep-pockets when it comes to extending the life of a patent

Sorry for the short (and delayed) post this week. I have been working on a variety of improvements to the site, including a major new feature that I hope to unveil early in 2019. So be sure to subscribe to the blog or, better yet, sign up to lock in early adopter pricing for a year.