Two days ago I posted this blog article inviting readers to share their plans for the important intellectual property meetings in the US that are scheduled for spring of 2020. Are people planning to attend the meetings? Are people planning instead to stay home? In this blog article I provide a brief summary of the responses, and you can see the full report here. Continue reading “Helping the meeting planners redux”
Help the meeting planners
Hello loyal blog readers. Imagine how stressful it is right now for the people who are planning the upcoming intellectual property meetings. INTA had planned its 2020 INTA Annual Meeting for Singapore, and canceled it, saying that it will schedule instead an annual meeting at some not-yet-selected city in the US, in May or June of 2020. I gather that AIPLA is trying to figure out whether or not to keep in place its AIPLA Stated Spring Meeting presently scheduled for May 6-8 in San Antonio, Texas. I have no doubt that the planners of the 2020 USPTO Design Day, scheduled for April 23 in Alexandria, Virginia, are wondering about all of this. I imagine that the planners of the ABA-IPL 2020 Annual Meeting, scheduled for April 1-3 in Washington, DC are also wondering about all of this.
The planners for those four meetings probably do not feel very comfortable trying to ask their potential attendees what their plans are. But I can ask questions that they might not feel comfortable asking. So I will. And I will aggregate the responses and provide them to the planners of the four meetings.
Did you attend any of these four meetings in the past three years? Are you thinking about attending one or more of these four upcoming meetings? If so, please please please answer this short questionnaire and please do so by tomorrow, Wednesday, March 11. It should only take two or three minutes and your answers might be a big help for the planners of these four meetings. The questionnaire does not ask for your name or email address. I will pass along the responses only in aggregated form.
Thank you.
Carl Oppedahl
Filing at the International Bureau and Daylight Saving Time
It’s that time of year again. The time of year when it is important to keep track of the fact that Daylight Saving Time is different in Switzerland from the way it is in the United States. This is important because you might be in the US, and you might be e-filing (or fax-filing) some document with the International Bureau of WIPO. Continue reading “Filing at the International Bureau and Daylight Saving Time”
USPTO bounces its own rendering of DOCX claims
I just received a Notice to File Corrected Application Papers telling me that the PDF claims in IFW for my newly filed patent application don’t have the right line spacing. The Notice says that I have to reprint the claims and send them in again. But get this — I filed those claims as a DOCX file — a character-based file. Would you like to make a guess who it is that converted that DOCX file into a PDF file? Yes. It was the USPTO that did the conversion to PDF. Not me. So it’s the USPTO that got the line spacing wrong. Continue reading “USPTO bounces its own rendering of DOCX claims”
Letter has been sent to the Commissioner for Patents about DAS
A letter captioned THIRTY-ONE PATENT PRACTITIONERS got mailed today to Drew Hirshfeld, the Commissioner for Patents. You can see the letter here and you can track its progress through the US Postal Service here. The letter urges the USPTO to make four changes in its ways of handling the DAS (Digital Access Service) system administered by WIPO. Continue reading “Letter has been sent to the Commissioner for Patents about DAS”
One day remains for you to sign the letter to the USPTO about DAS
Twenty-one patent practitioners comment on USPTO rulemaking about Foreign Filing Licenses
(Update prompted by commenter Brooke: Yes the USPTO did what the Twenty-One Patent Practitioners asked. The did walk back the scary Federal Register notice. You can read about it here.)
On January 30, 2020 the USPTO published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking to fix what it thinks is a problem with its Foreign Filing License rules, 37 CFR § 5.11 et seq.
The background to all of this is that in the spring of 2016, WIPO announced that soon its ePCT system would be available as a way to generate ZIP files for use in filing PCT applications in EFS-Web (at RO/US). Shortly after WIPO announced this imminent new feature of ePCT, on May 6, 2016 the USPTO published a Federal Register notice giving very scary warnings to patent practitioners about the use of the ePCT system to generate such ZIP files. The May 6, 2016 Federal Register notice had the unfortunate effect of scaring many US patent practitioners away from making any use at all of the ePCT system.
My best guess is that nobody will file any comment suggesting any change in the wording of the proposed rule change.
The main problem that needs fixing, I suggest, is not so much the wording of the FFL rules themselves, but rather the fact that this Federal Register notice dated May 6, 2016 has been dangling in front of US patent practitioners for more than three years now, continuing to give its very scary warnings about the use of the ePCT system in connection with filing PCT applications in EFS-Web. The main problem that needs fixing is that when the USPTO promulgates its new FFL rules some time after March 30, 2020, as it nearly surely will, USPTO needs to expressly walk back the May 6, 2016 Federal Register notice. The opportunity to do this will present itself when the USPTO publishes its Federal Register notice promulgating the Final Rule.
On February 8, a group of twenty-one patent practitioners filed a comment in this proceeding. You can see it here. A main point in that comment is to remind the USPTO of the need for this express walk-back of the May 6, 2016 FR notice.
A second point made in the comment is to urge the USPTO to make its procedure for updating of bibliographic data in pending US patent applications more user-friendly, for example along the lines of the Rule 92bis “action” in ePCT.
The comment period closes on March 30, 2020. My hope is that readers will file their own comments to the USPTO’s rulemaking proceeding, which you can do here. One easy way to comment, if you find yourself in agreement with the twenty-one patent practitioners, is simply to file a comment adopting the recommendations of that comment.
Which Receiving Offices get picked most often?
You might wonder which PCT Receiving Offices get selected most often by PCT filers. For many years the top Receiving Office was consistently RO/US (the USPTO). In 2019 this changed. Continue reading “Which Receiving Offices get picked most often?”
Yet another fax bites the dust – Netherlands Patent Office
The Netherlands Patent Office has just joined the long list of patent offices around the world that have pulled the plug on their fax machines. See this notice dated February 6, 2020 in the PCT Applicant’s Guide.
Other recent blog articles about this kind of thing:
Please consider signing this letter to the Commissioner for Patents about DAS
(Update: The letter got sent on February 22, 2020. See blog post.)
You can see here a letter that will get sent to the Commissioner for Patents, Drew Hirshfeld, on about February 22. Please consider adding your name to the signature list of the letter.
In the letter, the signers ask four things.
- The signers ask that the USPTO discontinue its present practice of intentionally and actively aging PDX and DAS retrieval requests. They ask instead that going forward, the USPTO retrieve priority documents from PDX and DAS at the time that the applicant requests such retrieval. See for example this blog article and this blog article.
- The signers also ask that USPTO discontinue the PDX system, so that going forward, priority document retrieval from the EPO can take place through the DAS system. See for example this blog article.
- The signers suggest that Form PTO/SB/38 be reformatted so that the boxes for the important information (application number, DAS access code, filing date, Office of first filing) be large enough to permit text to be entered in a font that is easily read by the human eye even after the form has been degraded in the e-filing process. See this blog article.
- Finally, the signers ask that USPTO become a Depositing Office with respect to international patent applications (PCT applications) that have been filed at the RO/US (the receiving office of the USPTO). See this blog article.
To see the letter, and to see how to sign it, click here.