Robert Shanbaum, president of Ocuco Inc., reports that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office will begin the 20-month process of re-examining Seiko Epson's patent for freeform progressive lenses (6,019,470). “Historically, 22% of such re-examination proceedings result in all of the challenged patent’s claims being confirmed, but only 12% result in all claims being canceled. In most cases, the patent’s claims are changed so as to avoid the questions raised in the re-examination request.” When Shanbaum initiated the request for re-examination a month ago, he said that he "was familiar with engineering projects back in the early 1990’s at both Gerber Optical and Coburn Optical, which had as their objective the production of back-surface progressives. It struck me as absurd that Seiko Epson, or anyone else, could claim to have invented a category of lenses that we were feverishly trying to make years before they were allegedly invented.”
Seiko Epson filed the patent application with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in December 2009. Its publication date was December of last year, which means a USPTO examiner began the next step of the approval process: reviewing the patent request. Also as of December, the application has been available for public review, as on this Google site. Therefore, this is precisely the time period for companies or individuals, as is the case of Ocuco, to issue challenges to the entire patent claims or portions of the claim. Read more.
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