Author: Carl

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Save the date: PCT Seminar in San Jose on April 4

The Schwegman firm, carrying on a tradition of many years now, will offer a full-day live PCT Seminar in San Jose, California on Thursday, April 4, 2019.  Schwegman provides a wonderful service to the patent community with these seminars, which it provides free of charge.

Yours truly will be teaching this all-day seminar which will take place at the San Jose Marriott hotel.

Save the date!

Not only does this seminar provide a full day of training on the Patent Cooperation Treaty, but it offers invaluable networking opportunities during the breaks.

New topics since last year’s Schwegman PCT seminar will include a discussion of the five types of PCT Declarations, and best use of the DAS system.

When the registration web page becomes available, I will post the link in this blog. This seminar always sells out!  So you don’t want to miss the opportunity to register for this seminar.

If you want to make sure that you hear about the availability of the registration web page right away, make sure you are subscribed to this blog.

 

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Design Day 2019

I have it on good authority that Design Day 2019 will take place on Thursday, April 25.  This will be at the USPTO in Alexandria, Virginia.

So save the date!

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USPTO will be closed Monday January 14, 2019

The USPTO will be closed on Monday, January 14, 2019 because of a dusting of snow.  (OPM announcement.)

The small amount of snow giving rise to this closure would not even be noticed in other parts of the US such as the high altitudes of Colorado where Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC is located.  (Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC will be open as usual on Monday, January 14, 2019.)

The closing of the USPTO means that any response that would be due on Monday, January 14, 2019 will be considered timely if it is filed by Tuesday, January 15, 2019.

 

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Should you use our iNum telephone numbers?

Our “contacts” page for Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC lists some “iNum” telephone numbers.  Should you use those numbers?  The short answer is yes, you should use them if you find that you can call them for free.  And if you are located outside of the US, you might find that it will be cheaper for you to dial one of our iNum numbers than to dial our old-fashioned North American Numbering Plan (NANP) numbers.

What follows is an astonishingly long and rambling answer to this question. Continue reading “Should you use our iNum telephone numbers?”

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Enjoying a patent wall

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Let me tell you about a recent delightful experience.  I was in Manhattan, got to the building where my client Sendyne is located, and  stepped out of the elevator when I reached the floor that I wanted.  I was greeted by Sendyne’s Patent Wall (photograph above, click to enlarge).  What a treat!  You can see how important patents are to this company.  And if you get up close to the plaques, you can see that each patent lists my firm as the “attorney, agent or firm”.  Very gratifying!

I then had the pleasure of sitting down with two of Sendyne’s inventors to discuss some of their most recent inventions.  Barring some surprise, within a year or two we will probably add a few more plaques to this Patent Wall.

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USPTO will be closed on December 24, will reopen as usual on December 26

The President has signed an executive order dated December 19, 2018 closing most federal government offices (including the USPTO) on Monday, December 24, 2018.  This of course raises the usual question whether or not the closure constitutes “a federal holiday in the District of Columbia”.  To answer this question, Director Iancu has issued a statement dated Friday, December 21, 2018 deeming the closure to be such a federal holiday.

This means that any response that would be due at the USPTO on December 22, 23, 24, or 25, 2018 will be timely if it is filed on Wednesday, December 26, 2018.

The US entered a partial shutdown of the federal government a few hours ago, and it would thus be natural to wonder whether this might affect the USPTO, for example when the Office would be scheduled to reopen on Wednesday, December 26.  Here is what the USPTO web site says:

… the USPTO remains open for business as normal. This is possible because the agency has access to prior-year fee collections, which enables the USPTO to continue normal operations for a few weeks. Should the USPTO exhaust these funds before a partial government shutdown comes to an end, the agency would have to shut down at that time, although a small staff would continue to work to accept new applications and maintain IT infrastructure, among other functions.

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WIPO DAS portal now functions for US designs

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I am delighted to be able to report that the WIPO DAS portal now functions as it should for US designs.

This raises many questions, which I will try to answer:

  • What do you mean it “now functions”?  Did it not function before?
  • As a design practitioner in the US, should I perhaps be a bit embarrassed that I had not noticed that it was not functioning before?
  • As a design practitioner outside the US, should I perhaps be a bit embarrassed that I had not noticed that it was not functioning before?
  • Okay I give up.  What exactly is the WIPO DAS portal, what is its connection with US designs, and why do I need to know about it?

Finally, what is there about this WIPO DAS portal that would protect me, as a practitioner in an Office of Second Filing, from a risk of professional liability due to a lost priority claim due to failure to timely provide a certified copy?  Yes, I call this “the single most important point in this blog article“.  If you would like to eliminate this particular category of risk to yourself when handling such filings, then scroll down to the place in the article where I discuss this.

Continue reading “WIPO DAS portal now functions for US designs”

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The importance of SAOSIT

Those who file patent applications relying upon Article 4 of the Paris Convention should pay attention to the requirement that the second application needs to have its applicant be the same applicant or successor in title with respect to the applicant in the first application.  This gives rise to the initialism SAOSIT.  (It’s not an acronym — see this blog article.)

And there are some patent offices that take the position that the “cleanup” paperwork that brings about the “or successor in title” situation is paperwork that needs to have been executed chronologically prior to the filing of that second application.  I am told by practitioners in the UK and in EPO that this time relationship needs to be satisfied for either of those Offices.

One of the places where this comes up is with the filing of a provisional as discussed here.

Oh, yes, and if anybody wonders, I am the person who coined the initialism SAOSIT.  I think I coined it about six years ago.