Category: Patents

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USPTO credit card limit to be cut back still further

We get a lot of frequent flyer miles every year paying fees to the USPTO and WIPO by credit card.  The miles that we get are chicken feed compared with the frequent flyer miles that the really big filers — the Oblons and Sughrues of the world — may receive in this way.

Paying a fee by credit card offers the further benefit that we can “float” the cost for a month, and hopefully the client’s payment of its bill will happen promptly enough that we can pay the credit card bill in full using the money that just came in from the client.

Having said this, we note that the USPTO keeps tinkering with its credit-card payment system in ways that make it harder and harder to pay by credit card.  Just today USPTO announced another change.

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“Pegged”, or, which utility art units have biggest backlogs?

In my early days of amateur radio (call sign AA2KW) the way I knew how much current ammeterwas flowing in a circuit was by looking at a needle in a d’Arsonval meter.  With the meter at right, with the needle as shown you could fairly confidently say the current is 9.6 amperes.  But with this kind of meter if the current got too big, the needle would bump against a “peg”.  We would say “the meter is pegged” as a shorthand way of saying “the current is so big that it exceeds the range of the meter”.  With the meter at right if the needle were at “10”, a person who did not know how mechanical meters worked might mistakenly conclude that the current was in fact 10 amperes.  The real situation was that there was a “peg” to keep the needle from swinging further to the right.  If the needle happens to be at “10”, the true value might be 12 amps or 20 amps or more.

Which brings us to the point of today’s blog posting.  USPTO publishes statistics as to the backlogs for particular art units.  In Private PAIR, you can see the backlog for a specific one of your pending files, communicated as a “First Office Action Predication” based upon when your application was filed and which art unit you are in.  The FOAP tells you how many months from now that particular application is likely to receive its first Office Action.  USPTO also publishes general statistics for each art unit.  Recently I wrote about backlogs in the design art units.  Now I am going to say a few words about the utility art units with the biggest backlogs including the art units that are “pegged”.

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USPTO falling behind in deciding PPH petitions

(Followup postings here and here and here and here.)

USPTO’s internal standard for deciding PPH petitions is to try to attend to each petition with two months of when it was filed.  But the Office is falling behind.  What can you do?

The last time I asked USPTO about this kind of backlog, which was about two years ago, the Office cheerfully explained that if you want your PPH petition decided promptly, you can file a second petition.  This second petition is a petition under Rule 182, with a fee of $400 (smaller for small or micro entities), to ask that the PPH petition be decided promptly.

Anyway after we filed half a dozen of these $400 petitions, USPTO somehow allocated enough resources to the problem that PPH petitions were again being attended to promptly.  That was a couple of years ago.  But now USPTO has fallen behind again.

It sort of misses the point of PPH if USPTO fails to take up the PPH petitions promptly, seems to me.

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Canada takes a step toward Hague and PLT

The Canadian parliament has taken up a bill which, if enacted, would permit Canada to join the Hague Agreement (one-stop filing of applications for protection of industrial designs) and the Patent Law Treaty.

There has also been some progress in Canada toward eventually joining the Madrid Protocol (one-stop filing of applications for protection of trademarks).

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$7M judgment against patent law firm

In an order dated October 8, 2014, the US district court in Brooklyn has rendered a judgment of about $7 million against a Virginia patent law firm.  The award is tied to an allegation that the firm failed to pursue US patent rights for a client despite undertaking to do so.

There was a box that could have been checked on a patent office form, that might well have kept this lawsuit from happening had it been checked.

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Filing in EPO with a priority claim to a US application? If so, read this!

Sometimes when you log in at EFS-Web there will be a sort of “announcement of the day” on the main EFS-Web page.  Recently there was an announcement that said that US patent applicants need to be sure to file Form PTO/SB/69 to avoid getting in trouble with the European Patent Office.  I had never heard of Form PTO/SB/69 and had no idea that without it there was some risk of getting in trouble with the EPO.  So I looked into the matter and spoke with people at EPO and at USPTO about this.

Maybe you already know all about Form PTO/SB/69 in which case no need to read further.  Otherwise I invite you to read on.

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Bilateral priority document exchange between USPTO and Chinese patent office

USPTO and the Chinese patent office (“SIPO”) have quietly implemented a bilateral system for automated exchange of electronic priority documents.  This system, launched on October 8, 2014 bypasses the legacy approach through DAS (WIPO’s document access service).  Importantly, for inbound PDX to the USPTO, the four-character access code will no longer be needed.

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