Category: Industrial Designs

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For the next week, an extra hour available for WIPO filings

Filers in the Patent Cooperation Treaty, Madrid Protocol, and Hague Agreement systems (utility patents, trademarks, and industrial designs) know that it is important to keep always in mind when midnight will arrive in Geneva, where WIPO is located.

For a PCT filer, this matters because to get a same-day filing date, a PCT application being filed in RO/IB will (usually) need to be filed by 4 PM Mountain Time.  The same is true for filing an Article 19 amendment.  The same is true if you are using ePCT to file a Demand and Article 34 amendment.

For a Madrid filer, this matters among other things for the payment of decade renewal fees.

For a Hague filer, this matters for the the filing of an international design application at the IB.

The point of today’s post is that starting yesterday, and for the next week, you get an extra hour to get a same-day filing date.  The reason is that Europe and the US carry out their daylight saving time transitions on different days that are a week apart.

This means that you could file as late as 5 PM Mountain Time (instead of the usual 4 PM) and still get a same-day filing date.

Things will return to normal a week from now, on November 5, 2016.

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Several countries maybe soon to join Hague Agreement!

I had an opportunity to talk with a very nice person from WIPO.  This very nice person tells me that there are quite a few countries that are likely to join the Hague Agreement soon.  Listed in approximate sequence of when they might join are:

  • United Kingdom
  • Russia
  • China
  • Mexico
  • Israel
  • Vietnam
  • Canada

The typical first very visible step would be for a country to deposit an Instrument of Accession with the International Bureau of WIPO.  The usual next development would be that the Hague Agreement would enter into force, with respect to that country, three months later.

This is a very exciting time for the Hague Agreement.

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Joining the DAS club – Eurasian Patent Office

Logo of the Eurasian Patent Office

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.)

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Today is the day that PDX changes for Japan

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.

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Design Day is happening

Design Day 2017 is taking place right now at the USPTO in Alexandria, Virginia.  The room is packed, with people sitting around the edge of the room because all of the tables are occupied.  David Gerk is speaking right now.

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What does TYFNIL mean?

Recently in the Design Listserv a Paris Convention question arose.  The question was, under Article 4 of the Paris Convention, could a design application claim priority from an earlier utility application?  It’s a good question and if you have any thoughts about this, I urge you to join that listserv and share your thoughts.

But what prompts this blog article is the initialism “TYFNIL”.  (It is not an acronym.)  A listserv member pointed out that even if the Office examining the design application were to find nothing wrong with such a priority claim, the owner of the design protection would never really know for sure where they stood until TYFNIL.  What does that mean?   Continue reading “What does TYFNIL mean?”