Patents – Page 104 – Ant-Like Persistence

February 10, 2015

Followup to “PPH Petition Backlog – four months and counting”

(Followup posting here.)

Within our office we try to track our PPH cases pretty carefully. This prompted my recent blog postings here and here and here about the recent substantial worsening of the backlog within the USPTO in considering requests for PPH status. After months of no progress USPTO has managed to grant a few of our long-pending PPH petitions, and so we have some hard data as just now bad the backlog is in recent weeks.

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February 9, 2015

Followup to “drinking their own Champagne”

(Update: Forty-two Patent Practitioners have written to Director Vidal about this. See blog article.)

Readers of this blog will recall that the Board of Directors of AIPLA adopted a resolution urging the USPTO to give substantial deference in a US national-phase application to the work done earlier by the USPTO in its role as International Searching Authority and International Preliminary Examining Authority. AIPLA then wrote a letter to the USPTO about this. I call this (not AIPLA’s terminology!) inviting the USPTO to “drink its own Champagne”. I blogged about this. What happened next?

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February 9, 2015

Save the date — AIPLA PCT Seminars in July 2015

(See more recent blog posting with brochure and registration information.)

AIPLA has set the dates and locations for the Patent Cooperation Treaty seminars that will happen this coming July 2015. Here they are:

July 20-21 (Monday and Tuesday) in San Francisco
July 23-24 (Thursday and Friday) in Virginia

Those who have attended AIPLA PCT Seminars in the past know that these seminars are very different from the usual “just the facts” PCT seminar. These seminars have the benefit of spirited interaction among all of the presenters, including experienced patent practitioners from the US and from other countries.

Save the dates on your calendar.

Your blogger will be one of the presenters.

February 4, 2015

Followup to “Four Consecutive Fridays”

(There is a followup posting.)

On January 26 I blogged here about the earthquake that happened on January 15, in which the Swiss Franc jumped some 30% in value. I talked about how this earthquake affected the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. I mentioned that the legacy approach to currency exchange rate shifts entailed a time lag of as much as three or four months, a time lag that would cost WIPO some millions of dollars. I mentioned that the various patent offices around the world, in their role as PCT Receiving Offices, might or might not choose to accommodate WIPO by implementing new fee amounts sooner. I wrote to USPTO and to EPO to urge them to accommodate WIPO in this way. Here’s what I heard back from those patent offices …

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January 26, 2015

Four consecutive Fridays (PCT fees likely to increase in a few weeks)

(There is a follow-up posting and another follow-up posting.)

On January 15, 2015 the Swiss Franc rose by about 19% relative to the US dollar, as shown in this graph (source: XE.com). It’s likely to stay this way for some time. How will this affect filers of PCT patent applications?

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January 24, 2015

What not to do when drafting claims (lime and coconut)

In this blog post I will say a few words about what not to do when drafting claims. First a metaphor. Suppose the invention is the one in Harry Nilsson’s song “Coconut“. The first draft of the proposed patent claim, prepared by your new associate, is:

1. A method for treating a bellyache, the method carried out with respect to a lime and a coconut, the method comprising the steps of:

putting the lime in the coconut, and
drinking it all up.

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January 13, 2015

Urging USPTO to “drink its own Champagne”

(There is a followup posting.)

Let’s say you filed a PCT application and picked the USPTO to be your International Searching Authority. Suppose further that ISA/US decided the claims are patentable. When you enter the US national phase from that PCT application, may you safely assume that the USPTO will allow the application?

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January 5, 2015

CLE opportunity in Michigan on March 16

Last year the Intellectual Property Law Section of the State Bar of Michigan invited me to speak at their Spring Seminar 2014 in East Lansing, Michigan. It was a delightful event, well organized and well attended. From the point of view of a speaker, what’s nice is when an audience has lots of good questions. This was such an audience. I am delighted that they have invited me back to speak at this year’s Spring Seminar 2015.

You can see the program and brochure. It will be Monday, March 16, again in East Lansing. Fellow intellectual property bloggers Martin Schwimmer (The Trademark Blog) and Eugene Quinn (IPWatchdog) will also be presenting, each of them in a plenary session.

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January 3, 2015

Video Documentary “Inventing to Nowhere”

If you have not already seen it, you might want to look at the video documentary “Inventing to Nowhere”. It talks about the importance of the patent system. It is quite well done.

January 2, 2015

Most-read postings in “Ant-like Persistence” for 2014

The arrival of a new year prompts every blogger to look back to see which postings in the previous year reached a lot of eyeballs.

Well, by far the most-read posting for all of 2014 in Ant-like Persistence was “A little-known USPTO initiative to reduce the backlog“. This posting, dating from early April of 2014, might be of great interest to patent practitioners who missed the original posting.

In second place was “USPTO is closed today, Monday, March 17“. This was the posting that told readers that it was a snow day in Washington. It meant that anything that needed to be filed in the USPTO on Monday March 17 could be postponed until Tuesday March 18 and still be timely.

The people who subscribe to this blog are likely to hear of such USPTO closings in the future. So if you have not already done so, subscribe to the blog. And if you have a friend or colleague who would like to hear about it when the USPTO has a snow day, encourage them to subscribe to the blog.