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Design Day XIII wrapped up at about 5PM, at which point the attendees headed over to the aptly named Trademark Bar. I was delighted to have had many opportunities during the day and at this beverage break to meet with colleagues and friends in the design community.
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I am delighted to report that USPTO is providing really excellent wifi at today’s Design Day.
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Here is Design Day XIII — a room full of design geeks and design nerds. This includes dozens of design Examiners from the USPTO, hundreds of design practitioners, and many industrial designers.
In ordinary domestic US utility patent practice, every practitioner is accustomed to the fact that you can get away with filing your patent application with informal drawings. And later when you get around to it, you can prepare formal drawings and file them in your application and it will almost never be a problem.
As I discuss at some length in this blog post, it is the exact opposite situation with PCT applications. The general rule is that if you try to hand in formal drawings after filing day in a PCT application, you will not succeed.
What should practitioners keep in mind about formal and informal drawings so far as PCT applications are concerned? Continue reading
MEET THE BLOGGERS, widely recognized as the best non-INTA event ever devised, will be convened for the fifteenth time (thus “MTB XV”) on Monday, May 20th, 8:00 – 10:00 PM, at Kings Dining and Entertainment (a/k/a KINGS BOWL), 60 Seaport Boulevard (a few blocks from the Convention Center). Come and meet some of the best trademark attorneys in the world, and while you’re at it say hello to the bloggers. For details, directions, and the RSVP link, go HERE.
W.C. Fields famously joked about a sweepstakes in which first prize was a week in Philadelphia … and second prize was two weeks in Philadelphia. Well, here the second prize is listening to me drone on via Youtube for 5¾ hours about the Patent Cooperation Treaty. Free of charge, other than the risk of nodding off. Continue reading
Alert blog reader Greg McLemore tipped me off to yet another sort of IP/tech aspect of Brexit that I had not thought about — Internet domain names that end in “.EU”.
It turns out that the registry in charge of dot EU Internet domain names had some months ago set a policy that if and when the UK ceases to be part of European Union, this would start a two-month time period at the end of which any domain registrant whose contact address is not in the EU (a code phrase for any registrant whose contact address is in the UK) would lose the domain name.
Presumably most domain name owners in this situation would do whatever is needed to adopt some sort of contact address that is within the (post-Brexit) European Union.
The most recent development, which you can see here, is that these plans regarding dot EU domain names will be put on hold for the time being.
If I were a UK-domiciled registration of a dot EU domain name, I would be watching this very closely.
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For many years the Best Practice for filing in RO/US has been to use a ZIP file as the way to provide the PCT Request to EFS-Web. Originally the only way create the ZIP file was PCT-SAFE. Three years ago WIPO announced that ePCT would be available starting on June 1, 2016 as a second way to create the ZIP file. Shortly after this announcement, USPTO published a Federal Register notice that put a cloud over the use of ePCT in this way. WIPO has made a change to ePCT that obviates concerns raised in that notice. Hopefully now the USPTO will publish a “cloud removal” Federal Register notice that expressly cites the previous notice and that expressly removes the cloud.
In this blog article I explain that at this point ePCT is now without question the Best Practice for creating the ZIP file. And I offer proposed language for a “cloud removal” Federal Register notice. Continue reading