Among the fallout from the new Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA) are the fees established by the Patent and Trademark Office for initiating any of the new or modified procedures for reconsidering the validity of an issued patent. For many, these fees were a true eye-opener. However, with political considerations and the AIA itself driving financial policy for the PTO to be self-supporting (making users pay for the services provided by the PTO), it should have come as no surprise that the fees for the extensive PTO involvement in these post-grant procedures would be of a different order of magnitude than historical PTO fees. And they are.
This raises two questions:
