Monday, Monday, 25, 2020 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 May 25 will be timely if it is done by Tuesday, May 26, 2020.
Patentcenter is broken for Hague cases
(This is Patentcenter trouble ticket number CP22.)
(This has still not been fixed as of June 10. I phoned the EBC to open another trouble ticket. The new ticket number is 1-696205867.)
I was quite surprised today to be reminded that a defect in Patentcenter that I had reported to the USPTO back in December of 2019 has still not been corrected. The defect is that it is impossible, in Patentcenter, to e-file any follow-on submission in any 35-series design patent application. You can see this in the screen shot at right. Continue reading “Patentcenter is broken for Hague cases”
The letter to EUIPO got delivered
It will be recalled that on Wednesday, April 1, 2020, eighty-four design practitioners and applicants wrote a letter to Christian Archambeau, the Executive Director of the European Union Intellectual Property Office. The letter said:
We write to you as design practitioners and applicants for protection of industrial designs. Many of the undersigned are members of the Industrial Designs Listserv, a community of design practitioners.
We are writing to request that the European Union Intellectual Property Office become a participating office in the WIPO Digital Access Service (DAS).
We thank you for your consideration of this request.
The letter was sent by Priority Mail Express International service, and would normally have been delivered in Alicante a day or two later. The envelope sat for seventeen days in a postal facility in San Francisco before being put on an airplane headed for Spain.
It got delivered Friday, April 24, 2020 at 1:49 PM. You can track the courier package here and you can see a PDF scan of the letter here.
Hopefully we will soon hear back from Executive Director Archambeau with good news about EUIPO’s imminent participation in the DAS system.
How many design applications have been filed in Patentcenter?
The alpha testing of Patentcenter began in about August of 2018. My firm was among the first of the alpha testers of Patentcenter. The other day I realized that it’s easy to figure out how much of the testing my firm has done. I was fascinated to see that my firm has filed about half of all of the design applications that anybody has filed in Patentcenter. Continue reading “How many design applications have been filed in Patentcenter?”
DAS and Designs – slides and recording
Hello faithful readers. USPTO’s Design Day 2020 was set for April 23, 2020. I was going to present at Design Day on the topic of DAS and Designs:
Practical tips on using WIPO’s Digital Access Service (DAS), which is growing in popularity for design practitioners.
Then it got canceled — you know why it got canceled. So I made a plan to present my material instead as a webinar. The webinar took place on March 31, 2020. There was a lot of very helpful audience participation and I think the webinar went well as a consequence.
You can download the slides here and you can view a recording of the webinar here.
Please post comments below.
Reflecting on the “eighty-four practitioners and applicants” letter
I have had a moment to reflect upon the letter that just got sent from Eighty-four Practitioners and Applicants to the Executive Director of the European Union Intellectual Property Office. (You can read about it here.)
I am very proud and honored to be among the eighty-four signers of this letter. I am personally acquainted with some of the signers.
One of the signers whose name I recognize is an individual who filed one design application in EUIPO and then filed in the US and had to go to a lot of trouble to obtain a physical certified copy to perfect the priority claim in the US. That individual knows as well as anyone does, what a benefit will flow to the design community if and when EUIPO joins DAS.
Other signers whose names I recognize include some of the leading lights in the world of very experienced design protection practitioners, some of whom were serving design clients long before I ever was.
Thank you to those who signed. Let’s hope that the EUIPO chooses to join DAS and chooses to do it soon.
Carl
Eighty-four practitioners and applicants ask EUIPO to join DAS
The letter to Christian Archambeau, the Executive Director of EUIPO, garnered eighty-four signatures and got sent out today by Priority Mail Express. You can see a PDF scan of the letter here and you can track the courier package here. The letter got delivered on April 24, 2020. Here is the “ask”:
We write to you as design practitioners and applicants for protection of industrial designs. Many of the undersigned are members of the Industrial Designs Listserv, a community of design practitioners.
We are writing to request that the European Union Intellectual Property Office become a participating office in the WIPO Digital Access Service (DAS).
We thank you for your consideration of this request.
Time of day at RO/IB returns to normal for US filers
On March 8 I blogged that US filers filing documents at the International Bureau needed to pay extra close attention to what time it is in Switzerland. The reason is that in the US, Daylight Saving Time happened on March 8. But did not happen on that day in Switzerland. This meant that for the past three weeks, a US-based filer in (for example) the Mountain Time zone would be able to e-file in the IB as late as 5PM and still get a same-day filing date. This differed from the usual drop-dead time of 4PM.
Today (March 29, 2020) is the day that Daylight Saving Time happens in Switzerland. Continue reading “Time of day at RO/IB returns to normal for US filers”
Requesting EUIPO to join the WIPO DAS system
Would you like it if EUIPO were to become a participating Office in the WIPO Digital Access Service (DAS) system?
For example, suppose you have obtained a Registered Community Design (RCD) in the EUIPO, and now you wish to file a US design patent application claiming priority from that RCD. To perfect the priority claim at the USPTO, you need to somehow obtain a certified copy of the RCD application and you need to file it at the USPTO. It is not easy to obtain a paper certified copy of the RCD application. If only EUIPO were to become a participating Office in the DAS system, then you could easily use DAS as the way to get a certified copy from EUIPO to USPTO.
Here is your opportunity to join others in a request to EUIPO that it join the DAS system. A letter will get sent to the EUIPO asking it to join the DAS system. If you wish, you can become a signer of that letter. To read the letter and to see how to sign, click here.
AIPLA spring meeting is canceled
(Updated to include cancellation of the ABA-IPL annual meeting.)
Well it’s official. The American Intellectual Property Law Association has announced the cancellation of its spring stated meeting which was scheduled for May 6-8 in San Antonio, Texas.
This comes after the cancellation of USPTO Design Day which was scheduled for April 23 in Alexandria, Virginia. And it comes after the cancellation of the annual meeting of the International Trademark Association which had been set for Singapore in April and then had been shifted to happen in the US in May or June, and has now been rescheduled for November at some unspecified date and city.
I don’t know whether AIPLA’s decision to pull the plug on its spring meeting was influenced by my report of the results of a survey of meeting attendees about their plans.
The American Bar Association has likewise canceled the American Bar Association Intellectual Property Law section annual meeting, scheduled for April 1-3 in Washington, DC.