Maybe some readers of the blog have been on tenterhooks for the past two days, hoping to hear what meal I was eventually offered yesterday on my return flight from Maryland (blog article Hobson’s choice) after attending the sixteen annual Patent Cooperation Treaty Advisory Group Working Breakfast sponsored by the World Intellectual Property Organization. The answer follows. Continue reading “Tenterhooks, or how the Hobson’s choice came out”
e-filing at WIPO – you get an extra hour
It’s that time of year again. People in the US who sometimes e-file stuff at the International Bureau at WIPO will have memorized exactly what the local time is that works out to being midnight in Switzerland … and for the next week, the answer to this question will be different from the usual answer. Continue reading “e-filing at WIPO – you get an extra hour”
Hobson’s choice
United Airlines recently started asking its first-class passengers a few days before the flight whether they prefer one entree or the other. But for me it was a Hobson’s choice. Continue reading “Hobson’s choice”
Save the date! USPTO Design Day 2020
Save the date! USPTO Design Day 2020 will be Thursday, April 23. This will be at the big auditorium at the USPTO in Alexandria, Virginia.
Tomorrow is Mole Day
I trust that readers of this blog who are chemistry enthusiasts are paying attention to the fact that tomorrow is Mole Day. The observance of Mole Day runs from 6:02 AM tomorrow (10/23 or October 23) to 6:02 PM.
Have you made special plans for Mole Day? Please post a comment below.
Still another fax bites the dust
Now comes the news that on January 1, 2020, the Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property will turn off its fax machine. Continue reading “Still another fax bites the dust”
A very poorly designed USPTO form
(Update: A letter got sent on February 22, 2020 to the Commissioner for Patents at the USPTO, asking the USPTO to reformat this form. See blog post.)
Which patent form on the USPTO web site is the most poorly designed? Just now the form at the top of my list of poorly designed forms is Form PTO/SB/38, the Request to Retrieve Priority Applications. Continue reading “A very poorly designed USPTO form”
Comfort food
One way to purchase postage stamps from the US Postal Service is in coils of 100. Just today in our office we purchased and placed into service this plastic dispenser for such a coil. It is simple and elegant in its simplicity. This dispenser replaces our expensive postage meter which we got rid of some time ago (blog article).
This dispenser offers a sense of nostalgia, because it looks just like a dispenser that was in my home when I was a child. For me, it’s in the category of comfort food.
October 14 will be a holiday at the USPTO
Monday, October 14, 2019 will be a federal holiday in the District of Columbia. This means the USPTO will be closed. This means that any action that would be due at the USPTO on October 14 will be timely if it is done by Tuesday, October 15, 2019.
How the non-DOCX penalty will work for non-English filings?
USPTO published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking some months ago, proposing to hit the filer with a $400 if the filer files a patent application in a format other than Microsoft Word word processor format. (USPTO says “DOCX” but realistically the only way a filer can get USPTO’s system to work accurately is to generate the word processor file with Microsoft Word, and even then, only with Microsoft Word for Windows, in a very recent version of the software.)
I published two comments (here and here) explaining some of the reasons why I feel the USPTO got it wrong on this. And I joined seventy-two other patent practitioners in signing a comment that explored in quite some detail some of the things that USPTO got wrong on this.
I imagine most of us nowadays have started at least trying to e-file in DOCX, just to try to find out how bad it is so that we can get ready for how bad it will be when USPTO starts charging the $400 penalty. And recently I realized that there is a very interesting fact pattern that I am quite confident that no one at the USPTO thought about at all when it promulgated this Rule — the fact pattern where the initial filing is in a non-English language. Continue reading “How the non-DOCX penalty will work for non-English filings?”