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As I reported a week ago, the usual autumn thing happened with time zones. A week ago Europe “fell back” with daylight saving time.
Now today the US also “fell back”.
For the past week, US filers had an extra hour available to get a same-day filing date for filings at WIPO. A US filer could file as late as 5PM (Mountain Time) instead of the usual 4PM, and get a same-day filing date.
Now it is back to normal. The time of day to keep in mind is once again 4PM Mountain Time.
The search fee paid by US filers of PCT applications for the Russian searching authority will increase on December 6, 2017 from $482 to $698. You can see the details here.
This changes slightly the ranking by cost of the various searching authorities available to filers in RO/US. Here is how the search fees will rank after the fee change of December 6:
The result of this fee change is that, for the first time in a very long time, the Russian patent office will not be the least expensive searching authority for PCT filers in RO/US. ISA/US will be the least expensive (but only for a filer that qualifies for micro entity status).
Filers in RO/US tend to pick ISA/EP, ISA/US, or ISA/KR. It is relatively rare that a US filer will pick ISA/RU (or ISA/AU, ISA/IL, ISA/JP, or ISA/SG). Nonetheless, for the US filer who is planning to file a PCT application in which ISA/RU is selected, there will be an opportunity to save a little money. The filer could file on December 5 rather than December 6, and the savings would be $216.
I’ll be offering a webinar about intellectual property ethics. It is accredited for ethics credit CLE in California and Colorado. You can read about it here. Attendees will receive a Certificate of Attendance which might get you CLE credit in other states if you are lucky.
Those who are subscribed to this blog may use coupon code “blog17” between now and November 6 to get a $20 discount on this program.