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The United States Patent and Trademark Office (Office) takes this action to set and adjust Trademark fee amounts to provide the Office with a sufficient amount of aggregate revenue to recover its aggregate cost of operations while helping the Office maintain a sustainable funding model, ensure integrity of the Trademark register, and promote efficiency of processes.

Statement of Need:

The purpose of this rule is to set and adjust trademark fee amounts to provide sufficient aggregate revenue to cover the agency's aggregate cost of operations. To this end, this rule creates new or changes existing fees for trademark services.

Summary of the Legal Basis:

The Leahy-Smith America Invents Act (AIA), enacted in 2011, provided USPTO with the authority to set and adjust its fees for patent and trademark services. This authority was extended an additional 8 years by the Study of Underrepresented Classes Chasing Engineering and Science Success (SUCCESS) Act of 2018.  Since then, USPTO has conducted an internal biennial fee review, in which it undertook internal consideration of the current fee structure, and considered ways that the structure might be improved, including rulemaking pursuant to the USPTO's fee-setting authority. This fee review process involves public outreach, including, as required by the Act, a public hearing held by the USPTO's Trademark Public Advisory Committee, as well as public comment and other outreach to the user community and public in general.

Alternatives:

This rulemaking action is currently in development and alternatives have not yet been determined.

Anticipated Costs and Benefits:

The proposed alternative has qualitative benefits of improved fee schedule design and securing aggregate revenue to recover aggregate cost. No costs were identified. The user fees charged by the USPTO for its services are considered transfer payments that do not affect the total resources available to society, and therefore the changes to patent fees proposed by this rulemaking are transfers, and are not costs of this rulemaking.

Risks:

The USPTO will set and adjust trademark fee amounts to provide the Office with a sufficient amount of aggregate revenue to recover its aggregate cost of operations while helping the Office maintain a sustainable funding model, improve quality, and upgrade the Office's business information technology capability and infrastructure. Therefore, one risk of taking no action could be that USPTO might not be able to recover its aggregate costs of operations in the long run.