As is a recurring theme on this blog, my readers have led me back from darkness into the light. In response to yesterday’s post, Harry Vartanian pointed out that before 2001 there was no mandatory publication. Hence abandonments don’t show up in public pair data.
That is the should-have-been-obvious explanation for that suspicious jump in 2001. Wow. Big swing and a miss on my part there. But that is also what makes this blogging thing so much fun.
That said, I am still concerned about the heights to which allowance rates are currently climbing…
Here is an awesome visualization generate by the USPTO themselves using their private data and thus accounting for nonpublications1: (note although its small, there is a horizontal scroll bar at the bottom of the visualization, or you can view the directly here).
