USPTO Issues Rules on New Fee Structure

On January 27, 2005, the USPTO issued its final rules for revising the patent fees set forth in the the Consolidated Appropriations Act of 2004. A new section 1.52(f)(2) makes it possible to exclude sequence listings and computer program listings submitted via the Office electronic filing system when determining the application size fee required by § 1.16(s):

That is, for applications filed via the Office electronic filing system, a
sequence listing or a computer program listing is ‘‘filed in an electronic medium as prescribed by the Director’’ for purposes of 35 U.S.C. 41(a)(1)(G) only if the listing is submitted in ASCII text as part of an associated file of the application. Thus, for example, sequence listings or computer program listings submitted via the Office
electronic filing system in Portable Document Format (PDF) as part of the specification or as Tagg(ed) Image File Format (TIFF) drawing files would not be excluded when determining the application size fee required by § 1.16(s) or § 1.492(j).