(Corrected my mistake about the consequences of Uruguay having joined only Chapter I.)
I am delighted to see that Uruguay is on the way to membership in the Patent Cooperation Treaty. It has passed both chambers of the Uruguayan legislature, and is on its way to the executive branch for signature. Continue reading “Uruguay on a path to join the PCT”
Attend a 2½-day live in-person Patent Cooperation Treaty seminar in scenic Summit County, Colorado, next to Lake Dillon and surrounded by snow-capped mountains. Maybe also attend an optional half-day program specifically directed to docketing of the PCT. Tuesday, June 25 to Thursday, June 27, 2024.
For more information, or to register, click here.
Here is a subtle mistake that the USPTO made recently. The USPTO made it so that if a USPTO customer were to try to use Assignment Center using an IPv4 address, Assignment Center would work. But if instead the USPTO customer were to try to use Assignment Center using an IPv6 address (Wikipedia article), Assignment Center would fail to load. I reported this on May 7, 2024 in a posting to the Patent Practice listserv. You can see the listserv posting here.
Now on May 13, I see that the USPTO corrected its mistake. It is now possible to make use of Assignment Center even if you are using an IPv6 address.
I think what almost certainly happened is, one of the USPTO lurkers on the Patent Practice listserv saw the May 7 posting about the defect, and forwarded the posting to one of the Assignment Center developers, and eventually they corrected the defect.
Three times in February of 2024, by three different communications channels to the USPTO, I reported a defect in Assignment Center. The defect, shown at right, was that Assignment Center refused to permit me to record an assignment against a PCT application number.
Now, three months later, the USPTO did fix this defect. But the USPTO failed to let me know they fixed it. I had to stumble upon it by accident that the USPTO had fixed it. Continue reading “USPTO fails to let me know that it fixed a defect that I reported in Assignment Center”
Attend a 2½-day live in-person Patent Cooperation Treaty seminar in scenic Summit County, Colorado, next to Lake Dillon and surrounded by snow-capped mountains. Maybe also attend an optional half-day program specifically directed to docketing of the PCT. Tuesday, June 25 to Thursday, June 27, 2024.
For more information, or to register, click here.
Some practitioners have noticed that there has been a clerk in the Issue Branch who tirelessly marks up IDSs as shown at right. The clerk’s initials are TDR.
The USPTO has now burden-shifted this markup task to applicants, and wrongly so. Continue reading “USPTO shifts another burden to applicants – IDS citations”
Can the title of a not-yet-published US patent application reveal technical data? Read on to see the USPTO talks out of two sides of its mouth, reaching both a “yes” and a “no” answer to this question.
Continue reading “USPTO flip-flops on whether a patent application title reveals technical data”
Those who entered the US patent community only recently (within, say, the past decade) could be forgiven for being unaware of something called an “interference proceeding”. Continue reading “A helpful report from Chico Gholz on pending interferences”
When I was first in practice, you could purchase up to three months of extensions of time to pay an Issue Fee. That ended around a decade ago. For the past decade, the situation has been that if you are as little as one day late in paying your Issue Fee, the application will go abandoned. You would then be faced with the prospect of having to pay a USPTO fee of $2100 (or $840, or $420) along with a Petition to Revive, to overcome the abandonment.
With this in mind, here is a screen shot from Patent Center in an application that has received a Notice of Allowance. For this allowed US patent application, the legal advice from the USPTO is:
Payment of fees during this stage of the application process is optional, but failure to pay fees in a timely manner may cause delays in the processing of your application.
This legal advice is, as any experienced practitioner knows, flatly false. In no way is the payment of the Issue Fee “optional”. And the consequence of failing to pay the Issue Fee “in a timely manner” does not merely “cause delays in the processing” — it abandons the application.
For an experienced practitioner, this wrong legal advice probably routinely gets ignored. But in recent years the USPTO has done lots of outreach urging inventors to file pro se. It is surely only a matter of time before some pro se inventor believes this wrong advice and ends up with no patent at all.
Continue reading “USPTO gives legal advice, and it’s flat wrong”
Some firms and corporations are trying to figure out what to do about the USPTO’s DOCX initiative (the $400 non-DOCX penalty) that came into effect on January 17, 2024. Other firms and corporations have already decided what to do about the DOCX initiative. In recent days I surveyed firms and corporations about their present approaches to the DOCX initiative. How many law firms have written to their clients, telling them that the firm refuses to take the risks of filing in DOCX? How many firms and corporations have decided not to file in DOCX format (meaning that they have decided to pay the non-DOCX penalty)? How many firms and corporations have decided to file in the DOCX-plus-auxiliary-PDF path? How many firms and corporations have decided to file in the DOCX-alone path? Over 150 law firms and corporations responded to the survey. Read on to see the survey findings.
Continue reading “How law firms and corporations are dealing with USPTO’s non-DOCX penalty”
