Will you be in San Diego at the time of the INTA annual meeting? If so, there are two receptions that you won’t want to miss.
Continue reading “The two receptions that you need to attend in San Diego in May”
Six months and counting …
We have a case in which we filed a PCT-PPH petition on September 12, 2014. We are now into our seventh month of waiting for the Office of Petitions to rule on the petition. I’ve blogged about this problem at the USPTO before, here and here and here and here. It does not promote science and the useful arts to have PPH petitions sitting untouched for such a long time. Nor does it serve the goals of the PCT-PPH programs to have petitions sitting untouched for such a long time.
Speaking at AIPLA’s Patent Prosecution Boot Camp
I’ll be speaking this April at the AIPLA Patent Prosecution Boot Camp. This two-day seminar is tailored to new practitioners (those having less than two years of experience), or others who want to learn the basics of patent application preparation and prosecution. This seminar includes instructional sessions and hands-on claim drafting workshops.
Continue reading “Speaking at AIPLA’s Patent Prosecution Boot Camp”
Practitioner’s Guide to the PCT now available faster, cheaper
The Practitioner’s Guide to the Patent Cooperation Treaty is published by the AB
A. For the longest time you could only get it directly from the ABA and it cost a lot of money and took forever to arrive. Now you can get it faster and cheaper.
Continue reading “Practitioner’s Guide to the PCT now available faster, cheaper”
This weekend and your filings at WIPO
This weekend is when Americans (well, most Americans) change their clocks for Daylight Saving Time. This makes a big difference if you are going to e-file something at WIPO or fax-file something at WIPO.
Closure on changes in PCT fees (was “Four Fridays”)
Readers will recall my January 26 posting and my February 4 posting about the consequences of the decision on January 15 by the Swiss central bank to allow the Swiss Franc to rise to its natural level after over a year during which the bank had sought to cap the percentage difference between the Swiss Franc and the Euro. The Swiss Franc jumped 15 to 20 to 30 percent relative to various other currencies. I predicted that the International Bureau would seek to revise the “equivalent amounts” for the PCT international filing fee and other PCT fees payable to the International Bureau and would seek to make the revised fees effective much sooner than the usual delay of 3-4 months. Now the new fees have been set and indeed they will take effect sooner than the usual delay.
Continue reading “Closure on changes in PCT fees (was “Four Fridays”)”
Helpful webinars about ePCT
Almost daily I will encounter some patent practitioner or patent firm or corporate patent department that uses PCT but that fails to make use of ePCT. Of course when this happens I encourage the patent practitioner or patent firm or corporate patent department to start using ePCT. I imagine this to be a bit like the dentist who encourages people to brush and floss, sometimes feeling discouraged with the realization that some will not follow the advice. Now comes another series of webinars from WIPO explaining how to use ePCT.
Followup to “PPH Petition Backlog – four months and counting”
(Followup posting here.)
Within our office we try to track our PPH cases pretty carefully. This prompted my recent blog postings here and here and here about the recent substantial worsening of the backlog within the USPTO in considering requests for PPH status. After months of no progress USPTO has managed to grant a few of our long-pending PPH petitions, and so we have some hard data as just now bad the backlog is in recent weeks.
Continue reading “Followup to “PPH Petition Backlog – four months and counting””
Followup to “drinking their own Champagne”
(Update: Forty-two Patent Practitioners have written to Director Vidal about this. See blog article.)
Readers of this blog will recall that the Board of Directors of AIPLA adopted a resolution urging the USPTO to give substantial deference in a US national-phase application to the work done earlier by the USPTO in its role as International Searching Authority and International Preliminary Examining Authority. AIPLA then wrote a letter to the USPTO about this. I call this (not AIPLA’s terminology!) inviting the USPTO to “drink its own Champagne”. I blogged about this. What happened next?
Continue reading “Followup to “drinking their own Champagne””
Save the date — AIPLA PCT Seminars in July 2015
(See more recent blog posting with brochure and registration information.)
AIPLA has set the dates and locations for the Patent Cooperation Treaty seminars that will happen this coming July 2015. Here they are:
- July 20-21 (Monday and Tuesday) in San Francisco
- July 23-24 (Thursday and Friday) in Virginia
Those who have attended AIPLA PCT Seminars in the past know that these seminars are very different from the usual “just the facts” PCT seminar. These seminars have the benefit of spirited interaction among all of the presenters, including experienced patent practitioners from the US and from other countries.
Save the dates on your calendar.
Your blogger will be one of the presenters.