Category: PCT

(Update:  USPTO is doing a very customer-friendly thing about this, as I report here.)

One of the scariest things for a US patent practitioner is the thought of being held responsible for a patent that turns out to have been a “walking corpse”. A patent that everybody thought was a normal patent and it turns out that there is some defect that means it was never actually a patent at all.

My favorite category of “walking-corpse” patent had, until now, been the patent that was granted on a patent application in which the applicant made a non-publication request, and then did foreign filing, and failed to timely rescind the non-publication request. The rules say that such a patent application is deemed abandoned some 46 days after the foreign filing happened. But probably nobody involved at the time knew that the status of the application was “abandoned”. Not the Examiner, not the USPTO employee who cheerfully collected the Issue Fee and mailed out the ribbon copy of the granted patent. Least of all the practitioner who forgot about rescinding the non-pub request and who triumphantly handed the ribbon copy of the patent to the client. Likely as not, the first time this defect would get noticed is at litigation time.

Anyway until now that was my favorite example of a “walking corpse” US patent. But it looks like maybe there’s now a new category of walking-corpse US patents.  Continue reading “A new category of walking-corpse US patents?”

The Practitioner’s Guide to the Patent Cooperation Treaty is published by the ABA.  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”

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”)”

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.

Continue reading “Helpful webinars about ePCT”