Category: Patents

You will recall that last February I told you to save the date for the Nineteenth Annual AIPLA Patent Cooperation Treaty Seminars.  Registration is now open for the Seminars:

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

The AIPLA PCT Seminars are the best way to learn about the PCT and to bring yourself up to date about recent changes and developments in the PCT.

Registration for the Seminar also entitles you to attend a webinar, at no additional charge, on July 14.  The webinar is a PCT primer, providing an overview of the PCT system and the basics of filing a PCT application.

Continue reading “Register now for AIPLA PCT Seminar in July”

What happens so often is that the USPTO gets things wrong about the PCT process.  For example the USPTO seems so often to go out of its way to avoid giving any credit, let alone full faith and credit, to the work done by the International Searching Authority when it searches and examines a patent application.  So here is a refreshing example of the USPTO getting it right.

Continue reading “Sometimes the USPTO gets it right”

(Update:  USPTO is doing a very customer-friendly thing about this, as I report here.)

One of the scariest things for a US patent practitioner is the thought of being held responsible for a patent that turns out to have been a “walking corpse”. A patent that everybody thought was a normal patent and it turns out that there is some defect that means it was never actually a patent at all.

My favorite category of “walking-corpse” patent had, until now, been the patent that was granted on a patent application in which the applicant made a non-publication request, and then did foreign filing, and failed to timely rescind the non-publication request. The rules say that such a patent application is deemed abandoned some 46 days after the foreign filing happened. But probably nobody involved at the time knew that the status of the application was “abandoned”. Not the Examiner, not the USPTO employee who cheerfully collected the Issue Fee and mailed out the ribbon copy of the granted patent. Least of all the practitioner who forgot about rescinding the non-pub request and who triumphantly handed the ribbon copy of the patent to the client. Likely as not, the first time this defect would get noticed is at litigation time.

Anyway until now that was my favorite example of a “walking corpse” US patent. But it looks like maybe there’s now a new category of walking-corpse US patents.  Continue reading “A new category of walking-corpse US patents?”