Category: Patents

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Filing informal drawings in a PCT application

In ordinary domestic US utility patent practice, every practitioner is accustomed to the fact that you can get away with filing your patent application with informal drawings.  And later when you get around to it, you can prepare formal drawings and file them in your application and it will almost never be a problem.

As I discuss at some length in this blog post, it is the exact opposite situation with PCT applications.  The general rule is that if you try to hand in formal drawings after filing day in a PCT application, you will not succeed.

What should practitioners keep in mind about formal and informal drawings so far as PCT applications are concerned? Continue reading “Filing informal drawings in a PCT application”

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USPTO can now publish a new Federal Register notice about ePCT

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For many years the Best Practice for filing in RO/US has been to use a ZIP file as the way to provide the PCT Request to EFS-Web.  Originally the only way create the ZIP file was PCT-SAFE.  Three years ago WIPO announced that ePCT would be available starting on June 1, 2016 as a second way to create the ZIP file.  Shortly after this announcement, USPTO published a Federal Register notice that put a cloud over the use of ePCT in this way.  WIPO has made a change to ePCT that obviates concerns raised in that notice.  Hopefully now the USPTO will publish a “cloud removal” Federal Register notice that expressly cites the previous notice and that expressly removes the cloud.

In this blog article I explain that at this point ePCT is now without question the Best Practice for creating the ZIP file.  And I offer proposed language for a “cloud removal” Federal Register notice. Continue reading “USPTO can now publish a new Federal Register notice about ePCT”

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e-filing at WIPO — back to normal

For the past three weeks the situation for e-filing at WIPO has been that the local time to e-file so as to get a same-day filing date in Switzerland has been different from usual.  But today the people in Switzerland have turned their clocks forward.  So things are back to normal.

For example if you are in the Mountain time zone, once again as of today you will be counting toward 4PM local time to get a same-day filing date in Switzerland.  (For the past three weeks the answer was 5PM.)

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Broken links in “get your numbers in for the toteboards”

Hello readers. After comments from several people I went to look closely at my four recent posts:

Each blog article contains four important links for you to click on:

  • a link to the questionnaire where you can enter your numbers for the particular category in that particular blog post, and
  • crosslinks to the other three blog posts.

In each case the questionnaire link works fine so far as I am aware.  But until today, each place where there was a crosslink to one of the other three blog posts, the crosslink was no good.  It asked for a user ID and password instead of taking you to the desired page.

Thanks to alert readers, I have hopefully corrected the crosslinks.

Hopefully everybody will get their numbers in soon.