Author: Carl

As a reminder some PCT search fees will change today for US PCT filers.

The ISA/EP fee will drop 5.3%, to $1992.  As of today, for the first time in thirty-eight years, this will be cheaper than ISA/US (for large entities).

The ISA/KR fee will drop 5.4%, to $1114.  As before, the real bargain at ISA/KR is the cost of the second through n^th inventions will still only cost a couple of hundred dollars each.

The ISA/JP fee will drop 10.7%, to $1372.

The ISA/IL fee will drop 2.8%, to $911.

For a filer that counts the search fee price as a big factor in the selection of searching authority, these fee changes leave roughly unchanged the ranking of searching authorities by cost.

For a filer that uses EFS-Web or ePCT as the mechanism for e-filing of a PCT application, you do not need to worry about accidentally paying the wrong fee, because the e-filing system will automatically quote the correct fee.

There are still many other factors which might influence an applicant’s selection of International Searching Authority, as I summarize here.

Gary Smith of the PCT Learning Center will be teaching about the Patent Cooperation Treaty in Los Angeles on Tuesday, March 7.  You can sign up for the morning part only (“PCT Boot Camp”) or the afternoon part only (“PCT Strategies Session”) or both (“The Essential PCT”).

To learn more, or to register, click here.

The PCT Learning Center, with support from the World Intellectual Property Organization, will be sponsoring a seminar about the Patent Cooperation Treaty in San Francisco on Monday, March 13.  The presenters will be Gary Smith and yours truly.

You can sign up for the morning part only (“PCT Boot Camp”) or the afternoon part only (“PCT Strategies Session”) or both (“The Essential PCT”).

For more information, or to register, click here.

It looks like there are still seats available for the PCT Seminar that will take place this Thursday in San Jose.  I say this because the registration web page is still accepting registrations.  I must assume that the program will soon be sold out, so people should register now.

This Seminar is being provided free of charge by the patent firm Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner P.A. with additional sponsorship by the World Intellectual Property Organization.

I will be the presenter for this Seminar.  I really enjoy presenting this subject matter and I think the Seminar will be a lot of fun.  I urge readers to register and attend.

Readers of this blog will recall my article of a few days ago, describing what I suggested would be a strategy for saving a little money on PCT search fees.  I’m posting this note to draw your attention to a correction to that article which I posted today.  I offer my thanks to a nice person at WIPO who gently pointed out to me a couple of PCT rules which make clear that the strategy that I described a few days ago doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) work.

There’s still a bit of an opportunity to save money on PCT search fees, although not the opportunity that I described in that article of a few days ago.

In that article of a few days ago, I described that a filer might file a PCT application on February 28, 2017, while not paying the Search Fee.  I described that the filer might then on March 1, 2017 pay the Search Fee.  For a Search Fee the amount of which dropped on March 1, I figured this would be a chance to save some money.  Not so.  As I describe in the correction to the previous posting, the amount of Search Fee due is determined not by the date that the Search Fee is paid, but by the PCT filing date.

But for a filer that has the flexibility to file a PCT application on the filer’s choice of February 28, 2017 or March 1, 2017, the reduction in Search Fee could be taken advantage of simply by postponing the PCT filing until March 1.  (For example perhaps an identical priority document had been filed on or after March 1, 2016.)