These days it is pretty interesting to keep track of the growth of the Hague Agreement (the international filing system for industrial designs). Since a year ago there had been whispers (blog article October 21, 2017) that Mexico was going to join the Hague Agreement Real Soon Now. And then came the new successor NAFTA agreement (see blog article of October 2, 2018) which sets forth that Mexico must join Hague by no later than the date of entry into force of the new NAFTA agreement.
Richard Stockton
Anyway just now I was delighted to hear from Rich Stockton, who is chair of the AIPLA Industrial Designs Committee, about this particular topic. He reports that he met recently with some higher-up folks at the Mexican patent office. They told him that they expect the Mexican legislature will approve the implementing legislation during the current session and that no other major legislative steps remain other than depositing the instrument of accession (and then waiting the requisite three months for the accession to take effect).
He thus tells me that it looks to him as though Mexico will officially join the Hague system in the first few months of 2019.
This is, of course welcome news, and the accession of Mexico to the Hague system will be a welcome development.
When you use a presentation screen at a hotel, you can pay a few hundred dollars a day to rent a projector from a hotel. Or you can pay an A/V contractor to set up a projector. What I realized when I was setting up my recent PCT Seminar in Redwood City, California is that you can buy a projector and a screen and throw them away at the end of the meeting and it costs less money than renting.
What I also learned is that there are some really nice projectors available nowadays, such as this Epson 1781W projector. I’ve decided I will simply bring this projector with me every time I present at any meeting in the future.
What we are all accustomed to is having to bring our notebook computer with us to a meeting, finding the lectern, finding a fat cable, and connecting the cable to our computer. The cable runs to the projector and has been duct-taped to the floor so that it is not a trip hazard. The cable might be a VGA cable or it might be an HDMI cable. Years ago the projector’s input was always VGA and the computer’s output was always VGA. In more recent times more and more projectors do not have a VGA input; instead the input is HDMI. Some computers have an HDMI output. More and more notebook computers do not have a video output at all and instead the user must bring along an adapter that adapts USB to the desired output such as VGA or HDMI. In my experience there is only about a 50-50 chance that the adapter I brought with me to a meeting location (VGA or HDMI) will turn out to match the type of cable at the lectern. (You would think I would always remember to bring both kinds of adapters. Yeah right!) The A/V contractors sometimes plan ahead and carry a full range of adapters that convert VGA to HDMI and HDMI to VGA and so on. Of course what also happens is that the display screen image quality often suffers due to awkward interpolation conversions between the screen resolution of the source (the notebook computer) and the destination (the native resolution of the imaging device in the projector).
I have attended many a meeting where the first five or ten minutes of meeting time gets lost while everyone sits around as the presenter fumbles to try to get his or her computer to talk nicely with the cable and with the data projector.
What’s so nice about this Epson 1781W data projector? Well, a bunch of things. One thing is that it is thin and light compared with a lot of data projectors. It weighs only about four pounds (about 1.8 kilograms). It is only about 2.1 inches (about 5.3 centimeters) tall.
Still another nice thing about this projector is a feature that it has in common, I guess, with a lot of today’s generation of data projectors. You can shine it on a wall and no matter how awkward the angle that it hits the wall, the projector can “keystone” the image in an automatic way, by which we mean that the projector can change what it projects so that instead of a trapezoid, what appears on the display area is a rectangle. Not only that, however, with this projector you can point it at your display area and the projector will resize itself as needed to match the actual dimensions of your display area. I guess there must be a digital camera built into the projector. The projector shoots a sophisticated test pattern onto the display area and, I guess, it takes a photograph and analyzes the photograph and works out how to change what it projects onto the display area so that it will be a nice rectangle that fills the display area fully without spilling over.
In one test I pointed the projector toward a large wall area framed by a couple of potted plants. The projector worked out exactly how to size the image so as to exactly fill the area between the two potted plants, almost but not quite touching the two potted plants. It noticed where the potted plants were.
Another nice thing about this projector is that if you like, you could just put your presentation slides on a USB drive and plug the drive into a USB port on the projector, and use a remote control to click through the slides. What I mean is that you don’t even need to connect your computer to the projector. The only cable you need to connect to the projector is a power cable. Isn’t that nice!
Still another nice thing is that if you do feel that you need to connect your computer to the projector, you still do not need to use a cable to do it. You can connect the projector to wifi, and connect your computer to the same wifi, and use an app on the computer to cast the screen of the computer to the screen of the projector. This is very convenient. This is what I did for my recent PCT Seminar in Redwood City, California.
click to enlarge
One thing to watch out for is that in most hotels, they set up the wifi so that any two devices connected to the hotel’s wifi are blocked from communicating with each other. Any device that is connected to the hotel’s wifi is onlypermitted to connect to the Internet. So the hotel wifi is no good for permitting this kind of data projector to connect to your computer. So you have to use your own wifi hot spot or your own wifi router.
My personal favorite is the GL.iNet GL-AR750 travel router (at right) which is the size of a deck of playing cards and has every nice feature you could want in a wifi router, for a mere $45. But there are many very nice travel routers these days that would be well suited to such a purpose. This router is what I used with this projector for the recent PCT Seminar.
Oh and if you are stubborn and you actually want to use an HDMI cable with this Epson projector, you can. The projector does have an HDMI port. I just cannot imagine you would want to do this, since the other approaches are so much smarter.
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).
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:
CNIPA (the Chinese intellectual property office, formerly known as SIPO)
EUIPO (formerly known as OHIM)
JPO (the Japanese patent office)
KIPO (the Korean intellectual property office)
USPTO
At this point, so far as the members of the ID5 are concerned, the progress is as follows:
CNIPA is a Depositing Office and Accessing Office for patents and utility models and designs
EUIPO unfortunately does not yet belong to DAS. It is hoped that EUIPO will join DAS Real Soon Now.
JPO is a Depositing Office with respect to patents and utility models. JPO is an Accessing Office with respect to patents, utility models, and designs.
KIPO is a Depositing Office with respect to patents and utility models and designs (but see note below).
USPTO is a Depositing Office and Accessing Office for patents and designs (but see note below).
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.
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!]
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?”
