If you have a patent application that is on appeal, that you were thinking of letting go abandoned, this is your chance. Sell it to somebody who wants to get their appeal decided fast. But you’ve got to act quickly. This opportunity ends on June 19, just five days from now. Continue reading “Sell your patent appeal by June 19!”
Patent Trial and Appeal Board announces two-for-one sale
How did this two-for-one sale actually work out? See my follow-on posting about this program.
US patent practitioners will recall a two-for-one sale offered by the USPTO’s Examining Corps back in 2011. At that time the backlog of unexamined applications was so embarrassing that the USPTO came up with “Project Exchange”, aka the two-for-one sale. That program offered an opportunity to get fast examination of a first case that was pending as of October of 2009, so long as the applicant expressly abandoned a second case that was likewise pending as of October of 2009.
Taking a page from that play book, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board has announced its own two-for-one sale, called the “Expedited Patent Appeal Pilot”. If you have two ex parte appeals pending before the PTAB, you can abandon one of them and the PTAB will decide the other appeal fast.
Continue reading “Patent Trial and Appeal Board announces two-for-one sale”
Revisions to Best Practice for filing a PCT application in RO/US
Yesterday I posted Best Practice for filing a PCT application in RO/US. Shortly thereafter, a very nice person at WIPO sent half a dozen suggestions for making the posting better. So I have revised the posting. Be sure to use the revised version as it is better.
USPTO’s new Patent Application Alert Service
USPTO and Reed Tech have announced an interesting alert service. You go to this web page and create a user ID. And you set up one or more search terms of interest. Every Thursday, when USPTO releases another set of published patent applications, the system will use your search terms and will let you know if there is some matching published patent application.
Best Practice for filing a PCT application in RO/US
In this article I will describe the Best Practice for filing a Patent Cooperation Treaty patent application in the Receiving Office at the USPTO.
(Note on June 12, 2015 — a nice person at WIPO offered suggestions for improvement of this article, all of which were very helpful, so I have updated this article.)
Continue reading “Best Practice for filing a PCT application in RO/US”
USPTO still an SSL laggard
In August of 2014 I blogged that USPTO needed to implement SSL (“https://”) on all of its public-facing web sites. I also said that USPTO needed to implement PFS on all of its SSL-enabled web sites. (SSL and PFS are security features that protect visitors from eavesdropping by third parties around the Internet.) In that blog article I explained in detail why this is important. As just one of many examples of why this is important, the way things are now at the USPTO, third parties could eavesdrop and learn what search terms you are using when you search for a patent or a trademark registration.
Ten months have passed. It is now June of 2015 and USPTO has made no progress on this. None. Zip. Every USPTO web site that was vulnerable to this sort of eavesdropping in August of 2014 continues to be vulnerable today in June of 2015.
Now comes a directive from the White House saying the same thing now in June 2015 that I said in August of 2014. The directive tells all federal agencies that “all publicly accessible Federal websites and web services” must “only provide service through a secure connection” meaning https://. All agencies, including the USPTO, are required to get this done by December 31, 2016.
Let’s see how promptly the USPTO complies with this directive from the White House.
What’s the Best Practice for 92bis changes?
One of many nice things about the PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) system is that you can do one-stop shopping for changes in the bibliographic data. (In a somewhat similar way, the Madrid Protocol and Hague Agreement systems provide one-stop shopping for assignments and owner address changes.) By filing a so-called Rule 92bis request, you can update the inventor list, the name of the applicant, and/or addresses and citizenships thereof.
When I say “one-stop shopping” I mean that you do the change once and it covers multiple countries or Offices around the world.
But there are better and worse ways to carry out your 92bis request, and that’s the point of this blog posting.
Continue reading “What’s the Best Practice for 92bis changes?”
A reminder of an AIA trap for the unwary – “checking the box”
The America Invents Act took effect on September 16, 2012 and on March 16, 2013. Well over two years ago. So we don’t have to keep worrying about it nowadays, right?
Wrong, very wrong. We have to worry about it now even more than ever.
Here’s one example for the practitioner who is asked by foreign counsel to enter the US national phase from a PCT application. Continue reading “A reminder of an AIA trap for the unwary – “checking the box””
Register now for AIPLA PCT Seminar in July
You will recall that last February I told you to save the date for the Nineteenth Annual AIPLA Patent Cooperation Treaty Seminars. Registration is now open for the Seminars:
- July 20 and 21 (Monday and Tuesday) in San Francisco
- July 23 and 24 (Thursday and Friday) in Alexandria, Virginia
The AIPLA PCT Seminars are the best way to learn about the PCT and to bring yourself up to date about recent changes and developments in the PCT.
Registration for the Seminar also entitles you to attend a webinar, at no additional charge, on July 14. The webinar is a PCT primer, providing an overview of the PCT system and the basics of filing a PCT application.
Continue reading “Register now for AIPLA PCT Seminar in July”
Sometimes the USPTO gets it right
What happens so often is that the USPTO gets things wrong about the PCT process. For example the USPTO seems so often to go out of its way to avoid giving any credit, let alone full faith and credit, to the work done by the International Searching Authority when it searches and examines a patent application. So here is a refreshing example of the USPTO getting it right.