ARIPO African Regional Industrial Property Organization DO Designated Office under the PCT (Chapter I) EAPO Eurasian Patent Office EO Elected Of...
Six options to consider before your provisional patent expires
A provisional patent application expires 12 months after the filing date. As this deadline approaches, the applicant must decide what to do with the a...
Warning for companies about confidentiality agreements
Many companies, particularly in the manufacturing and investment industries, often receive unsolicited ideas. Perhaps your company has experienced thi...
Leaving your IP legacy: to whom will you pass down your intellectual property?
An often forgotten issue during estate planning is that copyrights (as well as patents and trademarks) are personal property. As such, they get passed...
Using Article 19 and Article 34 in patent amendments
After a PCT applicant receives a search report and written opinion, he may wish to respond to the Examiner’s comments “on the record.” There are...
Racing to the patent office
The AIA has started a race to the patent office. This will be especially true for technologies where several inventors, research teams or companies ...
Should I file a national or regional application for foreign patent protection?
The decision between filing a national application or a regional application involves numerous factors: the number of countries where protection is so...
ePCT
As of July 2012, the ePCT application of WIPO provides secure online access to PCT application files. (It is the equivalent of the USPTO public and pr...
Publication of PCT applications
PCT applications publish in the same manner as national or domestic patent applications. There is an internet publication of the application on the WI...
Choosing the International Search Authority (ISA)
For a PCT application, the patent office that performs the search on the invention is called the International Search Authority (ISA). Not all patent ...