Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
For many years we have known the Chinese intellectual property office as SIPO (State Intellectual Property Office). The news is that on August 28, 2018, this office changed its name to CNIPA (Chinese National Intellectual Property Administration, PRC).
The new internet domain name and web site are https://english.cnipa.gov.cn/.
There is welcome news that on October 1, 2018, USPTO joined DAS as a Depositing Office for purposes of designs.
This is welcome progress with respect to the ID5 (the five highest volume industrial design Offices). When people say “ID5”, they mean:
At this point, so far as the members of the ID5 are concerned, the progress is as follows:
The note is that USPTO and KIPO have a legacy relationship in the PDX system. And unfortunately the design of PDX is that it trumps DAS. If two Offices have a PDX relationship, this blocks any DAS relationship. So what needs to happen now is that USPTO needs to pull the plug on its PDX relationship with KIPO. I blogged about this here.
And of course JPO needs to become a Depositing Office for designs.
And EUIPO needs to become a member of DAS.
I am pleased to see that yet another Office has joined DAS. The National Institute of Industrial Property of Chile became both a Depositing Office and an Accessing Office, with respect to patents, utility models, and designs, on October 1, 2018. This is welcome news.
[Note from Carl Oppedahl: I received this text from a reader who suggested that I post it as a guest blog article. It is posted anonymously, for reasons that will become clear. Maybe you find it as interesting to read as I did!]
This is a long e-mail, but I hope that you will read it. I want to thank you for the blog that you posted last Saturday, because it saved me from a major malpractice exposure. Continue reading “A guest post from an alert reader”
Are you a user of the Madrid Protocol? Will you be in Washington, DC on Saturday, October 27?
If so, then please consider helping the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) — and yourself — by attending a focus group of US users of the Madrid system at 7AM on that day at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park hotel in Washington, DC. Although WIPO’s focus group will be held in conjunction with the AIPLA Annual Meeting, you do not need to be registered for the Annual Meeting to participate in the focus group.
Continue reading “Are you a user of Madrid Protocol? Will you be in Washington on October 27?”
The European Patent Office (EPO) will sponsor three seminars for US‑based patent practitioners, paralegals and their administrative staff. Continue reading “Three seminars in the US about EPO for paralegals”
The new NAFTA agreement has some very interesting consequences for patents and trademarks. Continue reading “NAFTA 2.0 and patents and trademarks”
The fee to be paid by a US PCT filer for a search carried out by IP Australia dropped today, from $1722 to $1631.
I mentioned this in a previous blog post.
You will not need to worry about accidentally paying an incorrect fee amount, because the e-filing systems have already been updated to reflect the new fee amount. For filers in RO/US, the EFS-Web system has already been updated. And for filers in RO/IB, the ePCT system has already been updated.
Starting from December 25, a trademark owner in Malawi can file a Madrid Protocol application to pursue protection in one or more Offices outside of Malawi. And starting from that date, a trademark owner outside of Malawi can file a Subsequent Designation to Malawi (or can file a new Madrid Protocol application designating Malawi).
It is recalled that the Patent Cooperation Treaty entered into force on January 24, 1978, initially with 18 contracting states. But perhaps not all readers appreciate that Malawi was one of those initial 18 contracting states for the PCT! Saying this differently, Malawi was more trendy, modern, and up-to-date about the PCT than most of the 152 present-day members of the PCT. Nobody joined PCT sooner than Malawi!
The two-letter code for Malawi is “MW”.
When you file a PCT application in a Receiving Office other than the RO/IB, the Receiving Office will consider whether it is “competent” to handle that particular PCT application. If the RO determines that it is non-competent, it will transfer the application to the RO/IB for further processing. (The application does not lose its filing date; the RO/IB will honor the filing date that had been given to the application by the first RO.)
Each RO determines its own conditions for “competency”. In the case of RO/US, the two ways that the RO might decide that it lacks competency as to a particular PCT application are:
Either of these situations will prompt RO/US to transfer a particular PCT application to the RO/IB.
But what, the long-suffering blog reader may ask at this point, does all of this have to do with “lorem ipsum“? Yes, those are today’s fun questions — the interesting question “what is lorem ipsum?” and the even more interesting question “what does lorem ipsum have to do with Receiving Office procedure under the Patent Cooperation Treaty?” Continue reading “It turns out there’s a name for this: lorem ipsum”