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Just a reminder that the USPTO will be closed on Monday, February 16. This is Washington’s Birthday* which is a federal holiday.
Anything that you might need to do by February 16 to satisfy some USPTO due date may be postponed until Tuesday, February 17 and will still be timely.
May 13, 2015 is an extremely important day for US design patent filers. Why? Because if you are smart about May 13, you can get a US design patent with a fifteen-year patent term rather than a fourteen-year patent term.
Continue reading “The importance of May 13, 2015 for US design patent filers”
The Hague Agreement is the international filing system for design protection that corresponds to the PCT filing system for international utility patent protection and the Madrid filing system for international trademark protection. The progress of the United States toward membership and participation in the Hague Agreement has been slow and at times tortuous. As I blogged here, President Clinton signed the treaty in 1999. Many years passed before the Senate ratified it in 2007. Congress needed to pass enabling legislation which finally happened in 2012. Next the USPTO needed to promulgate proposed Rules, which it did in 2013. The next important step was for the United States to deposit an “instrument of accession” to the Agreement with WIPO.
Interestingly somehow the United States and Japan managed to coordinate their efforts, and the two countries deposited their instruments of accession on the same day, Friday, February 13, 2015. You can see WIPO’s press release here. 
And at right is a photograph (courtesy of WIPO) showing the historic event. You can see US Ambassador Pamela Hamamoto handing the Instrument of Accession to WIPO Director General Francis Gurry.
Continue reading “US makes more progress toward the Hague Agreement”
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 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””
(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””
(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:
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.
Yes, the results are in. The Ant-Like Persistence blog is delighted to be able to present the 2014 US Design Patent Toteboard. This toteboard lists the forty-three highest ranked firms according to the number of US design patents which they obtained for clients. One corporation also chose to respond and is listed in the toteboard. These filers between them obtained about 24% of all of the US design patents in 2014.
You can also see corresponding toteboards for 2013 and 2012.
(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 …
Here are some of the firms which by now have sent in their US design patent numbers at this questionnaire.
These firms between them obtained about one-sixth of all of the US design patents that were granted in 2014.