Here is Design Day XIII — a room full of design geeks and design nerds. This includes dozens of design Examiners from the USPTO, hundreds of design practitioners, and many industrial designers.
Thirteenth Annual Design Day!
Filing informal drawings in a PCT application
In ordinary domestic US utility patent practice, every practitioner is accustomed to the fact that you can get away with filing your patent application with informal drawings. And later when you get around to it, you can prepare formal drawings and file them in your application and it will almost never be a problem.
As I discuss at some length in this blog post, it is the exact opposite situation with PCT applications. The general rule is that if you try to hand in formal drawings after filing day in a PCT application, you will not succeed.
What should practitioners keep in mind about formal and informal drawings so far as PCT applications are concerned? Continue reading “Filing informal drawings in a PCT application”
Meet the Bloggers XV
MEET THE BLOGGERS, widely recognized as the best non-INTA event ever devised, will be convened for the fifteenth time (thus “MTB XV”) on Monday, May 20th, 8:00 – 10:00 PM, at Kings Dining and Entertainment (a/k/a KINGS BOWL), 60 Seaport Boulevard (a few blocks from the Convention Center). Come and meet some of the best trademark attorneys in the world, and while you’re at it say hello to the bloggers. For details, directions, and the RSVP link, go HERE.
5¾ hours of Patent Cooperation Treaty!
W.C. Fields famously joked about a sweepstakes in which first prize was a week in Philadelphia … and second prize was two weeks in Philadelphia. Well, here the second prize is listening to me drone on via Youtube for 5¾ hours about the Patent Cooperation Treaty. Free of charge, other than the risk of nodding off. Continue reading “5¾ hours of Patent Cooperation Treaty!”
Brexit and .EU Internet domain names
Alert blog reader Greg McLemore tipped me off to yet another sort of IP/tech aspect of Brexit that I had not thought about — Internet domain names that end in “.EU”.
It turns out that the registry in charge of dot EU Internet domain names had some months ago set a policy that if and when the UK ceases to be part of European Union, this would start a two-month time period at the end of which any domain registrant whose contact address is not in the EU (a code phrase for any registrant whose contact address is in the UK) would lose the domain name.
Presumably most domain name owners in this situation would do whatever is needed to adopt some sort of contact address that is within the (post-Brexit) European Union.
The most recent development, which you can see here, is that these plans regarding dot EU domain names will be put on hold for the time being.
If I were a UK-domiciled registration of a dot EU domain name, I would be watching this very closely.
USPTO can now publish a new Federal Register notice about ePCT
For many years the Best Practice for filing in RO/US has been to use a ZIP file as the way to provide the PCT Request to EFS-Web. Originally the only way create the ZIP file was PCT-SAFE. Three years ago WIPO announced that ePCT would be available starting on June 1, 2016 as a second way to create the ZIP file. Shortly after this announcement, USPTO published a Federal Register notice that put a cloud over the use of ePCT in this way. WIPO has made a change to ePCT that obviates concerns raised in that notice. Hopefully now the USPTO will publish a “cloud removal” Federal Register notice that expressly cites the previous notice and that expressly removes the cloud.
In this blog article I explain that at this point ePCT is now without question the Best Practice for creating the ZIP file. And I offer proposed language for a “cloud removal” Federal Register notice. Continue reading “USPTO can now publish a new Federal Register notice about ePCT”
The fourth annual US Trademark Toteboard is out
It is my honor to post the fourth annual US Trademark Toteboard. This toteboard lists the firms that obtained the most US trademark registrations in 2018.
You can see the other 2018 toteboards here.
The fourth annual US Utility Patent Toteboard is out
It is my honor to post the fourth annual US Utility Patent Toteboard. This toteboard lists the firms that obtained the most US utility patents in 2018.
You can see the other 2018 toteboards here.
e-filing at WIPO — back to normal
For the past three weeks the situation for e-filing at WIPO has been that the local time to e-file so as to get a same-day filing date in Switzerland has been different from usual. But today the people in Switzerland have turned their clocks forward. So things are back to normal.
For example if you are in the Mountain time zone, once again as of today you will be counting toward 4PM local time to get a same-day filing date in Switzerland. (For the past three weeks the answer was 5PM.)
IP firm user guide to Afex
In several recent posts I blogged about Afex.com, a provider of international wire transfer services. By now we have migrated nearly all of our international wire transfer activity away from previous vendors and over to Afex. The user documentation for Afex is, said charitably, extremely limited. The documentation seems to assume that the reader is already an extremely experienced user of legacy wire transfer services, such that the reader only needs to learn a few things about Afex to be able to do all of the things that the reader already knew how to do with a legacy wire transfer service. What’s more, the documentation does almost nothing to explain how you would actually use the system if you are an intellectual property firm.
If you already have service set up with some wire transfer service provider, it would be very tempting to stick with what you know and are familiar with. But as I mentioned here and here, many of the legacy service providers really charge quite a lot, both in bank fees and in currency exchange rate fees, compared with what Afex charges. So it might be smart to start using Afex. The problem being that the documentation is so poor.
With this in mind, I have written a user guide that draws upon our experience using Afex.com to pay foreign IP firms and foreign IP offices (e.g. WIPO, KIPO) and using Afex.com as a way to receive bank wires from foreign IP firms. You can see it here. Please post comments and suggestions below.