Ant-Like Persistence

A long-standing member of the EFS-Web listserv (the listserv for US patent practitioners) wondered what to charge for a Track I request.  (Track I is the program in which the US applicant can get his or her application moved to the front of the line for examination merely by paying a fee.)  I figured I might as well post a series of blog pieces with a few thoughts about professional fees for the various programs by which an applicant can get a US patent fast.

Continue reading “What it costs to get a US patent fast via Track I?”

Every time we file a US patent application we worry about getting the wrong answer when we figure out whether or not to “check the box”:

For anyone who has suppressed their memory of this unpleasantness, recall that you, the practitioner, are required to take a position on whether the correct law for the Examiner to use in deciding what is patentable and what is not patentable is the “old law” or the “new law”.  And it is a certainty that ten years from now when your patent is being tested in litigation, the adversary will try to convince the judge and the jury that you told the USPTO the wrong answer on this point.

Alert reader Wayne Keown has pointed out that it did not take ten years.  I learned from Wayne that there is now a pending federal court case in which an accused infringer has alleged that a patent applicant got the wrong answer on “checking the box.”

Continue reading ““Checking the box” now being litigated”

In our office we track our PPH cases pretty closely.  Through most of 2014 and most of 2015, we had been seeing delays averaging six months.  It was taking the USPTO an average of six months to get around to deciding whether to grant or dismiss a PPH petition.  I blogged about this problem here and here and here and here and here.  I faxed a letter to Director Lee about this on April 24.  One or two recent data points suggest that maybe USPTO is being less slow about this. Continue reading “USPTO being less slow in deciding PPH petitions?”

In the old days it was not easy to know whether the recordation of an assignment against a PCT application number would count in Assignments On The Web (AOTW) as an assignment against the US national phase of that same PCT application number.  But now EPAS (the electronic patent assignment system) seems to be smarter about this.

Continue reading “EPAS gets smarter”