USPTO Nearing 17 Million Utility Patent Applications.

JW Note: Hat tip to fellow patent attorney @RyanAlley on Twitter for noticing this milestone yesterday.

Those in the patent practice know that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) assigns patent applications numbers based on a series code and a serial number. In general, these patent application numbers are assigned chronologically to patent applications as they are filed at the USPTO.

A rough guide and some application serial numbers are shown on the USPTO website here. For utility patent applications, the first series code “1” was assigned in the year 1915. The serial number begins at 000,000 and ends at 999,999. Therefore, the completion of each series involves the filing of one million applications.

It now appears that the USPTO either has, or shortly will be, moving on to the series code “17.” This means that there have now been 17 million utility patent applications filed since 1915. Quite a milestone.