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”
How about six little check boxes?
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?”
WIPO PCT Seminar in Geneva in September
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.
Sign up now for the AIPLA PCT Seminar
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.
Yet another urgently needed feature in Financial Manager
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”
Why it is super-important to get a Power of Attorney filed in absolutely every patent file
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”
Brexit and intellectual property
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”
Six days remaining to migrate your EFT methods to FM
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.
Six days remaining to migrate your Deposit Account to FM
USPTO rolled out its FM (Financial Manager) system in April of 2016. One of the USPTO’s goals is to force every holder of a Deposit Account to migrate its Deposit Account 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 Deposit Account and drop a refund check in the mail to the last known mailing address for the Deposit Account. To be able to use a Deposit Account in future, you will have to create a new Deposit Account and load money into it. Very likely this would take a week or so. So you would have a gap of some days or weeks during which you would be unable to use a Deposit Account for paying USPTO fees. Hopefully the refund check would not get lost in the mail.
Clearly it will save you a lot of trouble if you can get your Deposit Account migrated into the FM system before the remaining six days have passed. To do this, you will need an “authorization code” that you don’t have and that USPTO probably never provided to you. To obtain this crucial “authorization code”, call up the Deposit Account Branch at 571-272-6500. When we called, a few weeks ago, the person who gave us our “authorization code” was a nice person named Rebecca.
I expect this migration process will be particularly difficult or impossible for USPTO customers with complicated Deposit Account arrangements. For example a large corporation with several outside counsel firms may have a single Deposit Account which it permits the outside firms to use. Each of the outside counsel firms might phone up Rebecca trying to learn the crucial “authorization code”. June 30 might come and go without the migration being successfully accomplished.
How did your Deposit Account migration go? Do you have any tips to share? Please post a comment.
Djibouti has joined the PCT
Djibouti has joined the PCT. This brings the number of members to 150. You can read about this here. Djibouti deposited its Instrument of Accession with WIPO on June 23, 2016. As a consequence, any PCT application filed on or after September 23, 2016 will automatically designate Djibouti.
The two-letter code for Djibouti is DJ.
Seeing the tot
al now at 150 makes me think back to when I filed my first PCT application, in about 1986. At that point the PCT was about eight years old, and the number of member states was about forty. This graph shows the number of member states.