Experienced filers in the Patent Cooperation Treaty, Madrid Protocol, and Hague Agreement systems (utility patents, trademarks, and industrial designs) know that it is important to keep always in mind when midnight will arrive in Geneva, where WIPO is located. For a PCT filer, this matters because to get a same-day filing date, a PCT application …
Continue reading “For the next week, an extra hour available for WIPO filings”
The USPTO has known for a couple of years now that it needed to update its rule (37 CFR § 5.15) that spells out what you can and cannot do when you have a Foreign Filing License. Things came to a head in May of 2016 and one would have hoped that USPTO would have …
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It’s been many years since I first tried to nudge the USPTO in the direction of providing up-to-date web security for its customers. Up-to-date web security includes at least three measures: HTTPS connections for all e-commerce web sites PFS (perfect forward secrecy) for all HTTPS web sites DNSSEC (Domain Name System security) for all domain names …
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Our office e-filed a dozen patent applications at the USPTO on January 5, 2016. Today is January 8 and even now, not one of these patent applications is visible in PAIR. What we have heard from the Electronic Business Center is that this is a known problem. Other filers who filed patent applications on January …
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Both of the EFS-Web servers (the main one and the “contingency” one) are crashed, and have been crashed since December 22. This means that if you are going to file a PCT application in RO/US, you are stuck doing it by hand-carrying it on paper to the USPTO or running a paper application down to …
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When EFS-Web was new, the USPTO tried to be smart about bibliographic (bib) data. USPTO designed Form PTO/SB/14 which was an enormous (one megabyte) PDF form. The user could paste the bib data into the form. This included things such as “who are the inventors” and “what are their residences” and “what is the priority …
Continue reading “USPTO chips away at auto-loading of bib data into Palm”
(On December 21, USPTO released a new functionality called Corrected Web-based Application Data Sheet. I have posted a followup blog article about this new functionality.) Sometimes a filer needs to update bibliographic (bib) data in a pending patent application. In a recent blog post I talked about how USPTO’s preferred way of receiving requests for …
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Yesterday USPTO released its Global Dossier public access system. I blogged about this. In that blog article I listed three design flaws in that system. Today, having had a day to play with the system, I can describe something important that is missing from that system.
(See followup article here.) Weeks and months ago USPTO delivered webinars and other outreaches in which it demonstrated the soon-to-be-functioning Global Dossier public access system. Today the system got released. You can see it here. Its chief advantage for US filers will be that it will provide English-language access to information in the Japanese, Korean, and …
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A member of the PCT listserv asks: A colleague recently filed a PCT application with the USPTO and we’ve been receiving the notifications (such as the “Notification of the International Application Number and of the International Filing Date”, Form PCT/RO/105) by hard copy. Is it possible to receive electronic versions of notifications concerning a PCT …
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