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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
Followup to “Four Consecutive Fridays”
(There is a followup posting.)
On January 26 I blogged here about the earthquake that happened on January 15, in which the Swiss Franc jumped some 30% in value. I talked about how this earthquake affected the World Intellectual Property Organization in Geneva. I mentioned that the legacy approach to currency exchange rate shifts entailed a time lag of as much as three or four months, a time lag that would cost WIPO some millions of dollars. I mentioned that the various patent offices around the world, in their role as PCT Receiving Offices, might or might not choose to accommodate WIPO by implementing new fee amounts sooner. I wrote to USPTO and to EPO to urge them to accommodate WIPO in this way. Here’s what I heard back from those patent offices …
Four consecutive Fridays (PCT fees likely to increase in a few weeks)
(There is a follow-up posting and another follow-up posting.)
On January 15, 2015 the Swiss Franc rose by about 19
% relative to the US dollar, as shown in this graph (source: XE.com). It’s likely to stay this way for some time. How will this affect filers of PCT patent applications?
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Urging USPTO to “drink its own Champagne”
(There is a followup posting.)
Let’s say you filed a PCT application and picked the USPTO to be your International Searching Authority. Suppose further that ISA/US decided the claims are patentable. When you enter the US national phase from that PCT application, may you safely assume that the USPTO will allow the application?
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The importance of warning clients about unscrupulous fee requests
We all need to redouble our efforts to warn clients about unscrupulous fee requests. Four recent examples reminded me how insidious these fee requests can be. The first one asks me to wire $2322.30 to a bank in Slovakia. The second one asks me to wire $2738 to a bank in Czech Republic. The third one asks me to wire $2548.25 (where do they get these amounts?) to a bank in Slovakia. And the fourth asks me to wire $2327 to a bank in Czech Republic.
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