Today is the day that PDX changes for Japan

It will be recalled that recently the USPTO announced that it will change the way that electronic certified copies of priority documents are transmitted between the USPTO and the Japanese Patent Office.  The change takes effect today.  Among other things, this will affect how you complete your Application Data Sheet to present a priority claim to a Japanese patent application.

You can read about it in my blog post from September 24, 2017.

Upcoming opportunities to learn about PCT

There are quite a few upcoming opportunities to learn about the Patent Cooperation Treaty.

Of course a very good way to learn of upcoming learning opportunities about PCT is to check the PCT Seminar Calendar at the web site of WIPO. WIPO updates this calendar frequently.

Upcoming programs include:

USPTO doing well lately with PPH petition timeliness

At various times in the past, the USPTO has accumulated sizeable backlogs in its not-yet-handled PPH petitions.  But these days USPTO has been keeping up quite well.

We try to track this pretty closely.  The most recent half dozen PPH petitions that we filed at the USPTO were all acted upon at the USPTO within about six or seven weeks of filing.

Kudos to the USPTO for being timely these days with PPH petitions!

Why you probably can’t send international faxes any more

A couple of weeks ago I had the great honor to visit at WIPO with the heads of some of the PCT processing teams.  These are the people at the International Bureau who interact with callers (applicants and patent practitioners) who have questions and problems relating to PCT.  One of the things that they mentioned to me, that I found puzzling when I first heard it, is that in recent months they have received ever-increasing numbers of complaints from people who call to report that they try to send faxes to the International Bureau and are unable to do so.  Upon reflection I now realize the likely cause of this problem.  And it is definitely not that there is some recent malfunction in WIPO’s fax machines.

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