When you file a PCT application in a Receiving Office other than the RO/IB, the Receiving Office will consider whether it is “competent” to handle that particular PCT application. If the RO determines that it is non-competent, it will transfer the application to the RO/IB for further processing. (The application does not lose its filing date; the RO/IB will honor the filing date that had been given to the application by the first RO.)
Each RO determines its own conditions for “competency”. In the case of RO/US, the two ways that the RO might decide that it lacks competency as to a particular PCT application are:
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- no applicant identified in the Request is either a resident or citizen of the US, or
- the application is not in the English language.
Either of these situations will prompt RO/US to transfer a particular PCT application to the RO/IB.
But what, the long-suffering blog reader may ask at this point, does all of this have to do with “lorem ipsum“? Yes, those are today’s fun questions — the interesting question “what is lorem ipsum?” and the even more interesting question “what does lorem ipsum have to do with Receiving Office procedure under the Patent Cooperation Treaty?” Continue reading “It turns out there’s a name for this: lorem ipsum”