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As you may see here, I will be teaching some classes about the Patent Cooperation Treaty in the next few months. These include:
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.
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.
The 20th annual AIPLA PCT Seminar is now open for registration.
This will be Monday and Tuesday, July 25 and 26, in Alexandria, Virginia.
As a reminder the AIPLA PCT Seminar is different from other PCT Seminars in many ways. One way that it is different is that it offers not only patent office speakers but also practitioners. There are speakers from Europe and from China who will talk about using the PCT to get protection in EPO and in China.
Yours truly is one of the speakers.
For more information, or to sign up, or to book a hotel room at the seminar hotel, click here.
Kuwait has joined the PCT. Here you see Ambassador Jamal M. I. Al-Ghunaim and Director General Francis Gurry at the ceremony which took place June 9. 
[photo credit: WIPO]
This brings the number of PCT members to 149. Continue reading “Kuwait joins the PCT”
What are the Best Practices for docketing PPH? What are the chief sources of delay that the practitioner hopes to control or minimize as part of the PPH docketing process? In this article I will try to answer these two questions. Continue reading “Docketing PPH – chief sources of delay”
The other day I stumbled quite by chance upon yet another nice thing about ePCT. In this blog article I will describe the nice thing. And the alert reader might be able to win a prize. Continue reading “Yet another nice thing about ePCT”
Yours truly will speak at the Spring CLE program of the Tennessee Intellectual Property Law Association, on Friday, May 6 in Nashville, Tennessee. You can see the brochure here. I will lecture on best practices for use of the Patent Cooperation Treaty. I look forward to seeing lots of Tennessee patent practitioners at this program.
On March 13 I blogged that US filers filing PCT applications in RO/IB needed to pay extra close attention to what time it is in Switzerland. The reason is that in the US, Daylight Saving Time happened on March 13. But did not happen on that day in Switzerland. This meant that for the past two weeks, a US-based filer in (for example) the Mountain Time zone would be able to e-file in RO/IB as late as 5PM and still get a same-day filing date. This differed from the usual drop-dead time of 4PM.
Today (March 27, 2016) is the day that Daylight Saving Time happens in Switzerland. The consequence of this is that the time difference between the US filer’s time zone and the time in RO/IB is back to normal. So for a US-based filer in the Mountain Time zone, the drop-dead time returns today to the usual 4PM.
This change also affects a US-based filer filing a design application in the IB’s Hague Agreement e-filing system.