When I was first in practice some thirty years ago, the way that you kept abreast of any and all developments in IP law was … you paid $1000 per year to subscribe to BNA’s PTC Journal. This came out every two weeks, if I recall correctly, and told its readers about rulemakings, important court cases, and other developments. Some years later it became commonplace for professional organizations like AIPLA and the ABA/IPL to send out an email newsletter reporting important events maybe a week after the event occurred.
How things have changed. Nowadays if I want to know whether something important happened, the way I find out is that one of the IP bloggers blogged about it (see Patently-O and TTABlog and the other bloggers who sponsor “Meet the Bloggers“). Or I learn about it from one or another of the listservs for IP professionals (see some of the listservs here). Or if, like me, you are an adjunct professor on an IP subject, you can benefit from the IP Profs listserv. Generally if something interesting or important has happened, I can be pretty sure that I will hear about it from one of these valuable resources. And I will likely hear about it from one of these resources much sooner than from any of the legacy sources.
Which brings me to today’s posting. Alert listserv member Rick Neifeld posted an article to the PAIR listserv. He wrote:
WIPO is launching a structure search functionality early in October.
By which he means a functionality for searching chemical structures.
Now there have always been resources for searching chemical structures. The ones I have known about over the years were fee-for-service resources from providers such as Orbit and Dialog. I don’t really know but I have to assume that USPTO and the other major patent offices must have always had internal resources for searching chemical structures.
I like to think that I keep on top of many if not most outreach efforts and initiatives from WIPO. And I had never heard that WIPO is launching a structure search functionality, let alone that it would be launched early in October. How did I hear about it? From Rick in the PAIR listserv. Bless his heart he also posted his notes and comments and excerpts from the WIPO presentation slides. You can see them here. It seems that WIPO gave an outreach presentation today, and Rick attended, and later the same day he provided his very helpful notes.
As I understand it from Rick’s notes, this will be an add-on to the existing search functionalities of Patentscope.
Thank you Rick!
Oh by the way, the first poster to correctly identify the chemical in the structure quoted above will receive a piece of swag, namely an official OPLF voltmeter.
I will offer a few thoughts on how a trademark practitioner might pick when (during the prosecution of an ITU trademark application) to hand in the specimen of use. (I will assume the simple case in which a trademark application contains just one trademark class. In such a trademark application, there is generally a need only to hand in one specimen of use.)
