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This blog article is directed to paralegals and legal assistants and secretaries and administrative assistants.
I am going to make a stab-in-the-dark guess that at least one of your attorney bosses is avoiding learning about ePCT because they want to assume that you will be the one who keeps on top of knowing how to use ePCT. Continue reading “Paralegals! Try to get your attorneys to sign up for this webinar”
It is discouraging to see a recently increased level of passive-aggressiveness on the part of the USPTO about its role as an Accessing Office in the DAS system. This blog article briefly describes four ways in which the USPTO has recently started acting as if it wishes that the DAS system did not exist at all. Continue reading “USPTO is now passive-aggressive about accessing from DAS”
The WIPO DAS system is an important part of the daily work of the practitioner who files US patent applications that claim priority from non-US patent applications. And Form PTO/SB/38 is an important part of that daily work.
The USPTO has quietly eviscerated Form PTO/SB/38, and has not said why it did so. Continue reading “USPTO has eviscerated Form PTO/SB/38”
Today’s webinar was entitled Intro to ePCT, why ePCT is important, getting a user ID and password, setting up 2FA.
I conducted a few polls about 2FA during the webinar, and here are some results. Continue reading “Two-factor authentication in ePCT – polling results”
The USPTO appears to be digging in its heels on DOCX. The USPTO published a Federal Register notice on December 29, 2022 entitled Setting and Adjusting Patent Fees During Fiscal Year 2020 (click here to see it) that provided an email contact. On February 3, 2023 I wrote to the email contact, asking that my document The Fool’s Errand That Is DOCX (click here to see it) be placed in the rulemaking record. He wrote back saying this:
Thank you for your message.
In accordance with Office Policy, I have not opened the attachment.
I wrote back the same day, saying:
Dear Mr Polutta —
You mention an “Office Policy.” Could you please provide a cite or URL where it’s published?
I never heard back from him about this. So I guess he was refusing to place the document into the rulemaking record in response to my email message.
So I guess there is no choice but to send it to him on paper, so as to eliminate the excuse of it having been an email attachment. That is what I did today (click here to see what I sent). Let’s hope that now he might place this document into the rulemaking record.
Here is the ranking as of today, from most registrations down to fewest registrations, for the next eight ePCT webinars:
It is completely sensible for a patent office to be interested in receiving characters rather than images when a patent application is being filed. There is the potential for everyone to benefit from successful submission of characters. But DOCX is not (and never can be) the right way to do it, since DOCX fails as a way to communicate patent applications reliably or accurately. See for example the letter that 82 patent practitioners sent to USPTO Director Vidal on December 28, 2022 urging her to read my paper called The Fools’ Errand that is DOCX. I recently gave another attempt to filing a patent application using DOCX, and this time, one of the “DOCX fails” was that a Greek letter “μ” became an “m”. Continue reading “Trusting DOCX? Greek letter μ just became an m”
Hello readers. It will be recalled that in 2018 (see blog posting), the clock in the ePCT system looked like this:
Hello dear readers. There is an annual ritual which I keep hoping would eventually cease to be necessary, but yet again today the ritual presents itself. What I am talking about is the annual scheduling of four blog postings about Daylight Saving Time. Continue reading “An annual ritual for me – scheduled postings about DST”
Yesterday I opened up the first eight ePCT webinars for registration. In the first 24 hours, lots of folks have registered. But I know what you are asking! You want to know, which ePCT webinars have the most signups so far? Here is the ranking so far, from most registrations down to fewest registrations so far: