Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
As you may see here, I will be teaching some classes about the Patent Cooperation Treaty in the next few months. These include:
I teach advanced patent prosecution as an adjunct professor at the University of Denver. I hear from my students what it costs these days to buy a casebook for a class. Some cost $150. Some cost $200. So I am delighted to see that there is some movement in the direction of reducing this cost for the student. It comes from publishing-on-demand services such as Createspace and Lulu, as I will describe. Continue reading “The end of expensive law school casebooks?”
I’ll share my notion of the Best Practice for recordation of US patent assignments. Please post comments below. Continue reading “Best practice for recording US patent assignments”
The Office of Patent Application Processing could be nicer to applicants. Were OPAP to do so, this would promote science and the useful arts. Continue reading “How about six little check boxes?”
On September 26 and 27 (a Monday and a Tuesday), WIPO will conduct an advanced seminar on the Patent Cooperation Treaty. To register and to find out more, click here. Here is WIPO’s description of the seminar:
This PCT seminar is targeted towards patent administrators, paralegals and other users who are already familiar with the PCT System. This is a unique opportunity to learn more about the procedural details of the PCT system and some of the best filing and practice strategies, directly from PCT experts of the International Bureau of WIPO. Prior completion of the introductory PCT distance learning course is highly recommended.
The twentieth annual AIPLA PCT Seminar will take place July 25 and 26 (Monday and Tuesday) in Alexandria, Virginia. It’s time to sign up if you have not already signed up.
This Seminar is different from other PCT programs in that it has not only official patent office presenters but also practitioners. Among the presenters are a speaker from China and a speaker from Europe, and they will talk about how to draft a PCT patent application with China and Europe in mind. They will also talk about the process of entry into the Chinese national phase and European regional phase.
Yours truly is among the presenters.
To register, or to find out more, click here.
A couple of days ago I posted a list of some of the urgently needed features for the Financial Manager system. Here’s one more urgently needed feature. Continue reading “Yet another urgently needed feature in Financial Manager”
Over in the patent practitioner’s listserv (see EFS-Web) a question came up the other day about managing customer numbers. One list member pointed out that Private PAIR nowadays offers really handy file management functions. The Private PAIR user can easily update and change customer numbers, for example. But alert listserv member Jeffrey Wendt reminded us that these really handy file management functions are available only with respect to application files for which the user has filed a Power of Attorney (and has the good luck that the USPTO has recognized the Power of Attorney). And in fact there are many reasons, not only this PAIR file-management reason, why it is very very important to get a POA filed in every one of your active files. I will list some of these reasons. Continue reading “Why it is super-important to get a Power of Attorney filed in absolutely every patent file”
By now we have all seen the news. The voters of the UK have decided to leave European Union. I frankly feel this was not the best decision, but I will save my own detailed comments on this decision for later discussions.
For many readers the near-term question is how this will affect intellectual property protection. Here’s my take on this.
Continue reading “Brexit and intellectual property”
USPTO rolled out its FM (Financial Manager) system in April of 2016. One of the USPTO’s goals is to force every customer using EFT (electronic funds transfer) for USPTO payments to migrate its EFT method into the FM system. To this end, USPTO has set a last possible date of June 30, 2016 (six days from now) for this task.
If you miss the June 30, 2016 date, USPTO says it will simply shut down your EFT method. To be able to use EFT in future, you will have to create a new EFT arrangement. Setting up an EFT payment method involves an eight-day delay. So you would have a gap of some days or weeks during which you would be unable to use EFT for paying USPTO fees.
Clearly it will save you a lot of trouble if you can get your EFT payment method migrated into the FM system before the remaining six days have passed.
In our office we have two EFTs set up (drawing from two different bank accounts). We found that the migration of the EFT methods into FM was not very difficult (as compared with the high level of difficulty to migrate our Deposit Account).
The chief challenge is that once the EFT methods got migrated, each of the users within our firm had to go through a complicated and annoying process of constructing extra passwords for use of the EFT methods. The result is that each user had to print out yet another password and tape it to his or her computer screen. So much for improving security with these things.
Have you already migrated your EFT payment methods into FM? How did it go? Please post a comment below.