Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
Yesterday I blogged about what it might cost to get a US patent fast by means of Track I. Today I offer a few thoughts about what it might cost to get a US patent fast by means of AE (Accelerated Examination).
Continue reading “What it costs to get a US patent fast by Accelerated Examination?”
A long-standing member of the EFS-Web listserv (the listserv for US patent practitioners) wondered what to charge for a Track I request. (Track I is the program in which the US applicant can get his or her application moved to the front of the line for examination merely by paying a fee.) I figured I might as well post a series of blog pieces with a few thoughts about professional fees for the various programs by which an applicant can get a US patent fast.
Continue reading “What it costs to get a US patent fast via Track I?”
This is a very important milestone for the Madrid Protocol.
Some months ago I griped about ham-fisted DRM systems from Amazon and Microsoft. Now I will gripe about a ham-fisted DRM sy
stem from Ultraviolet, the movie viewing system that supposedly lets me “watch it anywhere!” and supposedly lets me “instantly stream & download” to my “tablet”. I finally got it to work, but only after about an hour and a half of struggle. The advertising claim of “instantly” downloading was quite false. Continue reading “More DRM frustrations — Ultraviolet movies”
A member of the PCT listserv asked:
On a US application filed yesterday with non-US inventors (no US assignee) and a PCT filing deadline of today, we filed through the USPTO and got a PCT application number, we just could not upload it as a PCT-Safe Zip file. The USPTO PCT Helpline said it was okay to file through the USPTO, just a $240 transmittal charge. We uploaded the PCT-101 request as a separate document. Will this be enough to secure a PCT filing date?
The answer is “maybe yes”, depending on the detailed situation. Continue reading “Filing a PCT application at the USPTO with no US applicants?”
A member of the EFS-Web listserv, an email discussion group for patent practitioners, posed this question:
We filed a US continuation application claiming priority to a PCT application filed in the EP receiving office. (The PCT application had no priority claim.) We filed the application by the 12-month convention deadline at the client’s request.
I do not think we need to provide a certified copy of the PCT, but can anyone confirm?
The question as presented turns out to be easy to answer — no, if you don’t want to provide a certified copy, you could avoid having to do so. But it would be at the cost of a year of patent term. The real question is “how may I avoid flushing a year of patent term down the drain?” Continue reading “Maximizing patent term (was “certified copy needed?”)”
(This article is a duplicate of a previous article.)
Every time we file a US patent application we worry about getting the wrong answer when we figure out whether or not to “check the box”:
For anyone who has suppressed their memory of this unpleasantness, recall that you, the practitioner, are required to take a position on whether the correct law for the Examiner to use in deciding what is patentable and what is not patentable is the “old law” or the “new law”. And it is a certainty that ten years from now when your patent is being tested in litigation, the adversary will try to convince the judge and the jury that you told the USPTO the wrong answer on this point.
Alert reader Wayne Keown has pointed out that it did not take ten years. I learned from Wayne that there is now a pending federal court case in which an accused infringer has alleged that a patent applicant got the wrong answer on “checking the box.”
In our office we track our PPH cases pretty closely. Through most of 2014 and most of 2015, we had been seeing delays averaging six months. It was taking the USPTO an average of six months to get around to deciding whether to grant or dismiss a PPH petition. I blogged about this problem here and here and here and here and here. I faxed a letter to Director Lee about this on April 24. One or two recent data points suggest that maybe USPTO is being less slow about this. Continue reading “USPTO being less slow in deciding PPH petitions?”
In the old days it was not easy to know whether the recordation of an assignment against a PCT application number would count in Assignments On The Web (AOTW) as an assignment against the US national phase of that same PCT application number. But now EPAS (the electronic patent assignment system) seems to be smarter about this.