Monthly Archives: September 2020

What is the protest fee in ISA/US?

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In the PCT listserv, a practitioner recently exasperatedly asked:

What is the protest fee in the International Searching Authority at the USPTO?

The movie Airplane makes clear how such a question should be answered.

Rumack (Leslie Nielson): You’d better tell the Captain we’ve got to land as soon as we can. This woman has to be gotten to a hospital.

Elaine Dickinson (Julie Hagerty): A hospital? What is it?

Rumack: It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.

So we realize the answer is:

It’s a fee that you pay if you have been invited to pay additional search fees and if you wish to protest the finding of a lack of unity of invention. But that’s not important right now.

Later in the same movie the following exchange occurs:

Elaine Dickinson: You got a letter from headquarters this morning.

Ted Striker: What is it?

Elaine Dickinson: It’s a big building where generals meet, but that’s not important.

Note the particular cleverness that Elaine delivers the straight line in the first exchange, and having learned how to be funny about this, in the second exchange she is the one to deliver the punch line.

Of course there is always the chance, however remote, that the practitioner was really asking something like:

What is the amount of the protest fee in ISA/US?

This turns out to be a very interesting question, and it prompted me to look up and compare the protest fees in each of the twenty-three ISAs. Here is the answer. Continue reading →

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Mexican Institute of Industrial Property joins DAS

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Yet another intellectual property office has joined DAS.  The Mexican Institute of Industrial Property (IMPI) will become a Depositing Office and an Accessing Office in DAS on Tuesday, November 3, 2020.

Only just now did I notice that the logo for IMPI is a Möbius strip!  

IMPI will be a Depositing Office for:

  • patent applications
  • utility model applications
  • industrial design applications

In addition, RO/MX will be a Depositing Office for purposes of PCT applications filed in RO/MX.

This offers a reminder that Mexico is one of the seventy-six Offices that provides utility model protection.

IMPI will be an Accessing Office for:

  • international design applications (Hague applications) filed at the IB
  • industrial design applications
  • patent applications
  • utility model applications

Which intellectual property firm in Mexico is the most trendy, modern, and up-to-date?   Send me a DAS access code for a Mexican patent application, a DAS access code for a Mexican utility model application, a DAS access code for a Mexican industrial design application, and a DAS access code for a PCT application filed in RO/MX.  I can then post Certificates of Availability (with a few digits of the application numbers blurred) for those four applications, and I will then be able to recognize your firm as the most trendy, modern and up-to-date intellectual property firm in Mexico.

USPTO seems to have walked back the US-designation-Hague-DAS-certified-copy problem

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click to enlarge

It is recalled (see blog post “Captain May I?” in Hague Agreement applications, August 20, 2020 and open letter to the Commissioner for Patents, September 2, 2020) that in about June of 2020 the USPTO came up with the notion that there was a trap for the unwary in the use of DAS as a way to perfect a priority claim in a US designation from a Hague Agreement design application.  The USPTO decided that I had supposedly stepped into this trap twice, representing a design applicant in two 35-series design patent applications.

Now the USPTO seems to have walked it back.  Although the USPTO did not communicate the walk-back as clearly as one might wish, the USPTO seems to have decided that this trap for the unwary never actually existed.  It means I never stepped into the trap, given that it never actually existed.  Continue reading →

The price of trademark privacy continues to be $100

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This blog post describes some most recent developments in the business of the Trademark Office granting $100 petitions for trademark applicants who do not want to tell Trademark Office employees exactly where they sleep at night.  This blog post talks about the privacy situation where the named applicant is a legal person (such as an LLC) rather than a natural person (a human being). Continue reading →