Patent allowance
The term patent allowance refers to modern U.S. patent processing, not in the early aero period. It means that USPTO's patent examiners have certified that a patent application meets the usual gating criteria of novelty, feasibility, and usefulness. The applicants are told this in writing. Then the applicants must pay certain fees and file some paperwork, and then the patent will be granted.[1][2][3][4]
It's a necessary term to understand the academic patent literature, as for example in this paper the authors simply avoid the historically standard term "grant." It's pretty clear from other sources that 99% of "allowed" patent filings are then "granted" within 3-6 weeks.[5]
We see analogous historic cases in our data where it appears that this happened, especially in Britain -- a filed and numbered patent had a fully formatted specification, but somehow wasn't granted. It may well have been simply that the last fee was not paid. Our main interest is in technological history, so there's not much difference between that and a properly granted patent, but we should track these differences when possible. A patent filing in this category should have a record in this database, marked as "not granted."
References
- ↑ Nolo Press has helpful plain documentation by Richard Stim and David Pressman. See, e.g. [1], or their Patents for Beginners.
- ↑ upcounsel.com
- ↑ Laura Payet. What is a Notice of Allowance Patent? At legalzoom.com
- ↑ 1303 Notice of Allowance [R-07.2015]] on US PTO web site
- ↑ Patrick Kline, Neviana Petkova, Heidi Williams, and Owen Zidar. 2018/2019. Who Profits from Patents? Rent-Sharing at Innovative Firms. NBER Working paper 25245.
