Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
Many patent offices around the world have e-filing systems for applicants. The Israel patent office launched an e-filing system a couple of years ago. I wonder how many readers are aware that there is an email discussion group for users of the e-filing system at the Israel patent office?
Continue reading “An email discussion group for e-filers in the Israel patent office”
One of the important listservs that all US patent practitioners should subscribe to is the PAIR listserv. This is a listserv designed, oddly enough, for users of PAIR. Earlier today, alert listserv member William B. Slate posted a screen shot from PAIR showing that the “search by customer number” menu was missing. And he’s right. It was missing. Later it returned in PAIR. William’s posting to the listserv prompted me to say a few words about how PAIR actually works and why it is actually cause for astonishment any time that PAIR actually works. Continue reading “Behind the scenes in PAIR and EFS-Web”
Gary Smith of the PCT Learning Center will be teaching about the Patent Cooperation Treaty in Los Angeles on Tuesday, March 7. You can sign up for the morning part only (“PCT Boot Camp”) or the afternoon part only (“PCT Strategies Session”) or both (“The Essential PCT”).
To learn more, or to register, click here.
The PCT Learning Center, with support from the World Intellectual Property Organization, will be sponsoring a seminar about the Patent Cooperation Treaty in San Francisco on Monday, March 13. The presenters will be Gary Smith and yours truly.
You can sign up for the morning part only (“PCT Boot Camp”) or the afternoon part only (“PCT Strategies Session”) or both (“The Essential PCT”).
For more information, or to register, click here.
Netflix has a delightful documentary series on industrial design. You can read about it on the Netflix web site and you can see the official Netflix trailer. Here is an Engadget review.
It looks like there are still seats available for the PCT Seminar that will take place this Thursday in San Jose. I say this because the registration web page is still accepting registrations. I must assume that the program will soon be sold out, so people should register now.
This Seminar is being provided free of charge by the patent firm Schwegman, Lundberg & Woessner P.A. with additional sponsorship by the World Intellectual Property Organization.
I will be the presenter for this Seminar. I really enjoy presenting this subject matter and I think the Seminar will be a lot of fun. I urge readers to register and attend.
The year 2006 was a remarkable year for the patent community in the United States. Jon Dudas was the Director of the USPTO then, and in the USPTO’s annual report, he reported that the allowance rate had been successfully reduced to 54 percent. In the annual report Director Dudas stated, as a matter of some pride, that “at 54 percent, the patent allowance rate was … the lowest on record.”
2006 was also the year in which Mr. Dudas launched the Accelerated Examination program for patent applicants. Now in 2017 it seems likely the AE program will be brought to a close.
Readers of this blog will recall my article of a few days ago, describing what I suggested would be a strategy for saving a little money on PCT search fees. I’m posting this note to draw your attention to a correction to that article which I posted today. I offer my thanks to a nice person at WIPO who gently pointed out to me a couple of PCT rules which make clear that the strategy that I described a few days ago doesn’t (or at least shouldn’t) work.
There’s still a bit of an opportunity to save money on PCT search fees, although not the opportunity that I described in that article of a few days ago.
In that article of a few days ago, I described that a filer might file a PCT application on February 28, 2017, while not paying the Search Fee. I described that the filer might then on March 1, 2017 pay the Search Fee. For a Search Fee the amount of which dropped on March 1, I figured this would be a chance to save some money. Not so. As I describe in the correction to the previous posting, the amount of Search Fee due is determined not by the date that the Search Fee is paid, but by the PCT filing date.
But for a filer that has the flexibility to file a PCT application on the filer’s choice of February 28, 2017 or March 1, 2017, the reduction in Search Fee could be taken advantage of simply by postponing the PCT filing until March 1. (For example perhaps an identical priority document had been filed on or after March 1, 2016.)
Update: A nice person at WIPO reminded me of PCT Rule 16.1(f) and PCT Rule 15.3. These rules, taken together, provide that the search fee due is based upon the international filing date, not the date of payment of the search fee. This means that what I wrote in the blog article of a few days ago isn’t right.
The Receiving Office, upon reviewing the fees paid and working out whether any addition fee is due, will (or at least should, according to the rules) check to see whether the fee actually paid ($1372, in my example) matches the fee that was due on filing day ($1536, in my example). If the two fees don’t match, the Receiving Office would mail out a Form PCT/RO/102 indicating that the deficiency ($164, in my example) needs to be paid.
So the trick of filing on February 28, 2017, and paying the search fee on March 1, 2017, would not work. My thanks to the nice person at WIPO who pointed this out to me.
PCT Rule 16.1(f) is interesting for a second reason. It uses the delightful Latin expression mutatis mutandis.
So often there is reason to be discouraged about this development somewhere in the world or that event in the US. But today I was reminded that even with innumerable reasons to be discouraged, there are sometimes reasons to look forward.
Today an important argument took place before the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco. The Court made this hearing accessible to everyone across the US to many places outside the US, via Youtube. As you can see on the screen shot, some 136000 people were watching the Youtube stream. (I understand that the Youtube stream was further propagated to some millions of additional listeners by various media.)
It gave me pause to realize that I was but one among millions of people listening to the lawyers for the two sides, and listening to the judges. Each of us perhaps finding this point more persuasive, that point less persuasive. Hearing a judge asking a question of one of the lawyers, maybe we asked ourselves how we would have answered the question. Maybe we compared the answer that we would have given with the answer that the lawyer actually gave. Each of us participating, in our own small way, in the making of history today.
Maybe one reader of this blog favored one side in this appeal, and maybe another reader of this blog favored another side. I don’t mean for this blog to be a place for arguing the merits of the appeal itself; there are many forums better suited to hosting such issues. My point is that we live in a country with institutions, including the courts, that have survived for over two hundred years. What I urge in this blog is for us to consider that it strengthens those institutions that across the US, and indeed in many countries around the world, anyone who wished to listen in on this appellate argument was able to do so.