The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office recently implemented a number of fee changes that will affect patent applicants and patent owners. Filing fees for patent applications have significantly increased, as have certain other patent prosecution fees. Issue fees, on the other hand, have been slightly decreased. Another change was eliminating the separate fee paid for publication of certain patent applications.

U.S. patent applications for which a corresponding application is filed in another country are always published, but applications for which there is no corresponding foreign application are published at the option of the applicant.  Publication does provide a limited benefit to applicants whose patents are subsequently issued with claims substantially the same as those published; however, until recently, there was a significant fee charged for publication.

Patent owners whose applications have been published with issued claims substantially the same as those published, are entitled to recover a reasonable royalty from infringers who begin infringing prior to the issue of the patent, for the period from commencement of the infringement after publication until the patent issues. Such patent owners are also entitled to recover at least a reasonable royalty from infringers for infringement occurring after the patent issues.

Some courts have held, however, that in order to recover a reasonable royalty from an infringer whose infringement began after publication but before issue of the patent, the patent owner had to prove that the infringer possessed a copy of the published application. Because this requirement, along with the requirement that the issued claims substantially mirror the published claims, limits the availability of the remedy for pre-issue infringement, some patent owners have elected to avoid publication of their U.S. application when no foreign application was filed, in order to avoid paying the publication fee.

Now, with the publication fee having been eliminated, the only reason to choose not to publish your U.S. patent application is if you believe that the invention can be maintained as a trade secret if the patent application is not allowed. 

Because inventions directed to machines and other devices cannot be kept secret once the invention is placed on the market, there is no longer any downside to publishing U.S. patent applications directed to such inventions.