Executive Summary: This article compares the USPTO ex parte appeal process before the PTAB with the JPO appeal against an examiner’s decision of refusal, using each system as a teaching framework for practitioners trained in the other. Its central point is that the two systems are analogous but not interchangeable: a USPTO appeal is triggered by the “twice rejected” rule and proceeds through a record-centered, brief-driven sequence—Notice of Appeal, Appeal Brief, Examiner’s A

Executive Summary: U.S. continuation practice is a uniquely powerful portfolio-management tool because it allows applicants to keep a patent family pending and pursue additional same-disclosure claim sets as markets, competitors, prior art, licensing needs, and litigation positions evolve. By contrast, Europe, China, Korea, and Japan offer important but more constrained follow-on mechanisms—principally divisionals, Korea’s narrower split/separate application procedure, and po

Executive Summary: Examiner interviews are a valuable prosecution tool, but their strategic significance varies sharply by jurisdiction. The central question is not simply whether an examiner will communicate with the applicant, but whether that communication carries procedural consequence, decisional authority, file-history effect, or merely informs the next formal filing. At the USPTO, interviews are routine and often powerful, but they must be recorded and may create prose

I. Introduction The recent Federal Circuit cases on patent eligibility do not simply show that U.S. law has become hostile to particular technologies. They show something more specific and more institutional: the United States often asks threshold eligibility doctrine to perform work that other patent systems assign to inventive step, enablement, support, or claim clarity. The point is not that those other systems are necessarily more generous. They may be demanding in differ