It was recently decided that the Eurasian Patent Office (official web site) will become a PCT International Searching Authority and International Preliminary Examining Authority.
Continue reading “Eurasian Patent Office is set to become an International Searching Authority”
Okay folks. Here are four more upcoming webinars for you.
The first three webinars, which all relate to the Patent Cooperation Treaty, are free of charge, thanks to the generous sponsorship of WIPO.
If you have not already done so, I suggest you share this page with all of your colleagues who handle PCT patent applications, so that they will have a chance to sign up for the PCT-related programs.
Who do you know that is scrambling around to try to pick up those last few ethics CLE credits before the end of the year? Share this page with that person so that they can consider attending the December 10 legal ethics program on securing electronic communications.
Who do you know that is scrambling around to try to pick up a bunch of general CLE credits before the end of the year? The price is right, especially for the first three programs.
If you don’t want to miss out on these and other webinars when they get scheduled, just subscribe to this blog.
(Update: it is time for you, dear reader, to consider signing another letter. See blog posting.)
I have published several blog articles (see them here) warning practitioners about the problems with the USPTO’s ill-conceived plans for requiring patent applicants to submit their US patent applications in Microsoft Word format.
Every patent practitioner should attend a free-of-charge webinar that will be presented tomorrow by the Schwegman firm on this topic.
A look at how to file using DOCX documents in the USPTO Patent Center and how what you end up filing may not be what you intended to file. Or, just pay $400 more and submit a PDF of the application that the inventor approved.
To learn more or to register, click here.
Hello readers. I am getting back into the routine of presenting educational webinars. Here is the next one, with more on the way.
Other upcoming topics include:
What other topics would readers like to see in upcoming webinars? Post a comment below.
There are many among us whose daily work includes the e-filing of sequence listings. By this we mean computer-readable listings of nucleotides and amino acids that form part of a patent application. The people who do this kind of work all made a mark on their calendars more than a year ago for January 1, 2022 for the Big Bang. Many of the people who do this kind of work belong to the ST.26 listserv (see blog article), which is an email discussion group for people who work with sequence listings when they e-file patent applications. (If you work with sequence listings, and if you have not yet joined the ST.26 listserv, then I suggest you join the listserv.)
The Big Bang relates to the way that the filer of a patent application formats the sequence listing. The way things are right now in 2021, if you are getting ready to file a patent application, and if you are going to need to include a sequence listing as part of the patent application, then you will be formatting it according to a standard called ST.25. But there is a new standard for the formatting of sequence listings called ST.26.
For more than a year, it had been planned that January 1, 2022 was the day when all of the patent offices of the world would commence requiring that a newly filed patent application be formatted according to ST.26 rather than ST.25. The colloquial way to say this is that what was going to happen on January 1, 202 was the “Big Bang”.
The big news is that all of the patent offices of the world recently had a meeting about ST.26 and they decided to postpone the Big Bang for six months, that is, until July 1, 2022.
This is, of course, a mix of good news and bad news, right?
For those filers who have been sort of dreading having to get used to the new way of formatting a sequence listing (that is, getting used to the ST.26 standard), then in a way this is good news. For most of us, if we think something is going to be unpleasant, then the news that the unpleasant thing is going to be delayed, it is a sort of natural reaction to count this as good news. On the other hand, some people will say that sometimes it is better just to “rip off the band-aid”. That if something has the potential to be unpleasant, maybe it is just as well to get it over with and to move on so that we can stop dreading the prospect of the dreaded event.
Not only that, but let’s assume for sake of discussion that there is some good reason for using ST.26 instead of ST.25. On this assumption, maybe it means that patent examiners can do their jobs better. Maybe it means that patent offices can do a better job of figuring out what is patentable and what is not. Maybe it means that when a searcher is doing a search in the database of all of the sequence listings that have ever been filed in any patent application (yes, there is such a database, and you can search it for free), the searcher will be able to do more and different kinds of searches that have a chance of leading more and better search results. Anyway, let’s assume this, that somehow ST.26 has a chance of promoting science and the useful arts better than ST.25.
If so, then the postponing of the Big Bang by six months is a postponement of whatever those benefits are of the use of ST.26.
So yes, this postponement is arguably a mix of both good news and bad news.
But setting aside whether you, the reader, personally think of the postponement of the Big Bang by six months as good news or bad news … I am posting this blog article to let you know, it is how things are going to be. The Big Bang for ST.26 will not happen on January 1, 2022 as previously scheduled. It will not happen until six months later, on July 1, 2022.
Here folks is a job posting for an intriguing PCT-related job opening at WIPO in Switzerland.
HEAD, PCT USER RESOURCES SECTION – P5 – 21201-FT
PCT Legal and User Relations Division, PCT Legal and International Affairs Department, Patents and Technology Sector
Application Deadline – 21-October-2021
The USPTO’s Financial Manager system is broken today. It is generating a monthly report that says your USPTO Deposit Account has a balance of zero even if your Deposit Account has lots of money in it. Continue reading “USPTO’s Financial Manager is broken today”
WIPO has two upcoming PCT webinars.
In this webinar you will be guided through the different steps on how to establish eHandshakes, create an access rights group, manage/share access rights and request eOwnership of already filed PCT applications. Your presenters are Pascal Piriou and Jiao Mo.
Tuesday 07 September : 09-10.30 am (Asia, India, Europe time zones…)
Registration link: https://wipo-int.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lVwEVDu_TxSOwi7IUJZFXw
Wednesday 08 September: 4:30-6:00 pm (America time zones)
Registration link: https://wipo-int.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EbCdVUgTSSOUbcaPlvmonA
In a previous blog article I reviewed USPTO’s progress with fixing known bugs in Patentcenter. In this blog article I now review USPTO’s progress in implementing feature requests and enhancements that beta users have asked USPTO to provide in Patentcenter.
By way of comparison, patent practitioners are accustomed to the responsiveness of WIPO when users suggest improvements and enhancements to the ePCT system. It is commonplace to see user-friendly features that get added to ePCT specifically because users have asked for them. WIPO personnel are subscribed to all of the relevant listservs and user groups for PCT users, and frequently it will be seen that a bug will get fixed or a feature will get added specifically because a WIPO person will have responded to a question or a comment in a listserv or in a discussion group.
If you have not already done so, you should join the PCT listserv and the Patentcenter listserv.
With this background, one might hope that USPTO would from time to time respond to suggestions and feature requests from user groups by implementing requested features or enhancements in Patentcenter. It is this hope that prompted me to carry out a review recently of the Patentcenter feature request list to see what progress USPTO has made. This blog article summarizes my findings. Continue reading “How it is going with feature requests and enhancements for Patentcenter”
Patentcenter is still nominally in beta test, but USPTO seems to be plowing ahead with its plans to force all applicants to e-file patent applications in Microsoft Word format (the Microsoft Word dialect of DOCX) and has long ago stopped any development or feature enhancements for EFS-Web or PAIR. USPTO has said it will shut down EFS-Web and PAIR and users will have no choice but to use Patentcenter to do the things that have in the past been done through EFS-Web and PAIR. So what is the progress at the USPTO with fixing the known bugs in Patentcenter?
There is a Patentcenter beta tester user community, tied together by the Patentcenter listserv. (Interested persons should join that listserv.) A committee from the listserv met last autumn with some USPTO developers and it was hoped that this might lead to some progress with fixing some of the bugs in Patentcenter. It was also hoped that USPTO would listen to users and implement some of the enhancements and features requested by users.
About four months ago, it was explored that the committee might meet again with USPTO people to review the bug list and to see what progress USPTO had been made with the bug list. Some time has passed and the meeting had not yet happened. So to save time, I have prepared this report that summarizes my best assessment of USPTO’s progress with the bug list. Maybe some time soon the meeting will be able to take place and there will be an opportunity for further dialog. In the mean time, this blog article reviews USPTO’s progress in this area. (Preview: things look grim.)
In a subsequent blog article I will review USPTO’s progress with the list of requested feature enhancements for Patentcenter. (Preview: things look grim in that area as well.)
Continue reading “How things are going with bug fixes in USPTO’s Patentcenter”
