By Donald Zuhn — USPTO Proposes Electronic Issuance of Patents In a notice of proposed rulemaking published last month in the Federal Register (86 Fed. Reg. 71209), the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is proposing to issue patents electronically through its patent document viewing systems (i.e., Patent Center and Patent Application Image Retrieval (PAIR)). As a result of the proposed changes to the rules, the Office would no longer issue patents on paper or physically deliver patents by mailing them to the correspondence address, and 37 C.F.R. § 1.315, which states that "[t]he patent will be delivered or mailed upon…
