Category: Industrial Designs

The intellectual property community benefits each time another Office joins the Digital Access Service (DAS).

The good news is that on November 1, 2017, the Eurasian Patent Office (EAPO) will join DAS.

EAPO will participate with DAS in both directions:

• as a depositing Office, and
• as an accessing Office.

The participation will include color documents as well as gray scale and black and white documents.

This is very good news.

Perhaps the biggest patent office (in terms of volume of patent filings) that has not yet joined DAS is the European Patent Office.  Here is a set of slides which EPO presented in May of 2015.  At slide 8, the EPO said:

It will surely be a welcome development when EPO joins DAS.

Another welcome development will be when EUIPO joins DAS, which will facilitate exchange of priority documents for the purpose of industrial design applications.

(See followup article on EPO’s plans to join DAS.)

It will be recalled that recently the USPTO announced that it will change the way that electronic certified copies of priority documents are transmitted between the USPTO and the Japanese Patent Office.  The change takes effect today.  Among other things, this will affect how you complete your Application Data Sheet to present a priority claim to a Japanese patent application.

You can read about it in my blog post from September 24, 2017.

Do you sometimes file a US patent application that claims priority from a Japanese patent application?  Do you sometimes give instructions to Japanese counsel to file a Japanese patent application that claims priority from a US patent application?  In either case, you need to know about something important that will change on October 1, 2017. Continue reading “Japan and PDX and October 1”