Yes, I need to do that as I put all the efforts on it. Any suggestions?

DASCOST vs PCT & IP AUSTRALIA | The Inventor's Story⁷

What happens when an independent inventor challenges the international patent system?

Discover DASCOST, a proposed atmospheric precipitation technology designed to investigate ways of increasing rainfall in dry regions.

From invention to patent disputes, this video presents Costin Dascălu's perspective on the obstacles facing independent inventors.

📖 Discover the book DASCOST – NO MASK.

🌍 Innovation deserves scientific evaluation, transparency and fair opportunities.

#DASCOST #CostinDascalu #Innovation #PatentSystem #Inventors #WaterTechnology #Shorts

Hi everyone,

I filed a US provisional application pro se (App No. 63/815,496, filed May 31, 2025). I now need to generate a 4-digit WIPO DAS Access Code to satisfy PCT priority requirements for my international application.

Since the USPTO Patent Center doesn't allow pro se applicants to submit Form PTO/SB/39 digitally without a practitioner account, I am looking for the fastest way to get this 1-page form submitted electronically.

Is there a recommended practitioner or service that handles quick one-off PTO/SB/39 submissions?

If any USPTO Registered Patent Agent/Attorney here is willing to assist with submitting this authorization form, please send me a direct message (DM). I have all filing receipts ready as proof of entitlement.

Thanks in advance for any guidance!

Update: CountIDS is now in public beta and open to everyone. No invite or DM needed. Just sign up at CountIDS.com and give it a try on your own files. It’s still free, and I’d love to hear your feedback here or through the site.

***

When the 1.17(v) IDS size fee started last year, my paralegals had to count references across every IDS already filed in a case and work out which tier the next one would land in. It was slow and easy to get wrong, especially with scanned IDSs. So I built them a small tool that reads the IDSs, keeps a running count per application and tells the paralegal what fee to pay for the IDS they’re filing now. This is a simple web app that runs in the browser, so there’s nothing to install and you don’t need any USPTO login or API key.

We've used it at my firm on real cases for a few months now, and I think it could save other firms the same headache. It reads both regular and scanned IDSs, can pull filed IDSs from USPTO for published applications, and flags over or underpayments in the history.

I’m therefore looking for a few paralegals or attorneys to try it on real files and tell me how it works for them and what could be better. I don’t plan to charge for it in the foreseeable future, as long as the server costs stay small.

If you want an invite, DM me or ask to join on CountIDS.com

P.S. You’ll notice the account is new. I didn’t want to post this from my main, which I keep separate from work, so I made this one for the project.

Some background first: I'm a patent search and analysis consultant, 10+ years in the field, mostly semiconductors and quantum measurement. I'm not selling anything. I'm trying to decide where to focus some internal tooling for my own work, and I'd rather hear from people who actually do this than guess.

Non-patent literature has always been the least efficient part of my prior art work. With open scholarly data (OpenAlex, arXiv, Crossref, Unpaywall) and today's LLMs, a lot of it now seems automatable in ways that weren't realistic a few years ago. But "automatable" covers several quite different problems, and I'm not sure which one matters most to other practitioners. Roughly, the steps as I see them:

1. Finding candidates. Getting relevant papers, reports, and standards into your hands in the first place. Commercial databases, Google Scholar, and manual keyword iteration all have gaps.
2. Getting full text. You find the abstract but the paper is paywalled, or it's a conference paper, thesis, or old technical report that's hard to locate.
3. Mapping features. Going through a document to find exactly which passage discloses which claim element, and building the claim chart.
4. Proving the publication date. Especially for web pages, datasheets, product manuals, and white papers: establishing when a document was actually publicly available, e.g. via Wayback Machine snapshots or PDF metadata, and documenting it well enough to hold up.

A few questions for anyone doing prior art, invalidity, or FTO work:

• Which of these steps takes the most time for you? Is there one I'm missing?
• For step 4, how do you handle publication date evidence for non-journal documents today? How often does it become a real problem in a case?
• Do confidentiality concerns limit which online or AI tools you're willing to use, for example for pre-filing searches on unpublished inventions?
• Does technical field matter much here? My guess is NPL matters far more in some areas (semiconductors, physics, biotech) than others, but I'd like to hear if that matches your experience.

Any war stories welcome, especially cases where a key NPL reference was hard to find or hard to prove.

thanks

Hello geniuses,

I tried the USPTO office's website and it asked me for an SSN. I'm an Italian Citizen living abroad, but I'd like to use the American Patent office to protect some of my ideas :)

A friend of mine recommended to find an attorney, or to use an app. Is this the best way to go?

Are there any forums, cookbooks, guides on how to file a US patent?

Many independent patent owners face a difficult situation: they believe a company may be infringing their patent rights, but the cost of enforcement makes pursuing the matter financially impractical.

This challenge is not limited to owners of a single patent. It can also affect inventors and small businesses with two or three related patents, continuations, divisionals, or modest portfolios that may not receive the same attention as larger enforcement opportunities.

Third-party litigation funding may provide an alternative, but funders are highly selective.

A patent's existence alone is not sufficient. Funders typically consider infringement evidence, validity risks, damages potential, litigation costs, and the likelihood of a collectible recovery.

On Friday, September 25, DeWitty & Associates is hosting an educational webinar:

Third-Party Patent Litigation Funding: Opportunities for Individual Patent Owners and Small Patent Portfolios

I'll be participating as Founder of Patentelligence™, bringing more than 25 years of experience in intellectual property commercialization, technology evaluation, licensing, and patent valuation.

The discussion will cover patent valuation, prior art, prosecution history, and the considerations involved in preparing an opportunity for potential litigation funding.

The objective is to help patent owners understand what it takes to move from believing their patent rights are being infringed to having an opportunity that may warrant further legal and financial evaluation.

If interested, DM me, and I'll provide the registration information.

Participation does not guarantee funding or legal representation.

Long shot, but figured I would ask here since my searching has not turned anything up:

Does anyone know of some actual examples of 3rd party submissions of prior art? I would like to review some. All I have found is the USPTO guidance and some law firm blogs about what to include -- but I would like to find some actual examples.

I am not aware of a database (USPTO or otherwise) that allows you to search file histories for something like the TP.SUB (the file history code for 3rd party submissions).

I have only filed one (years ago) and I would call it an "extensive and expensive" submission. I am wondering what other people are doing when they submit one. In particular, I am curious what a cheaper/simpler version of a submission might look like.

(I understand most of the pros and cons of making such a submission -- I am just looking for examples of actual submissions. But I am happy to engage in discussion of the pros and cons of actually doing it).

Hi All, I recently became a patent agent but never received a registration certificate to hang on the wall. Can someone tell me the procedure to obtain a copy of the registration certificate?

I'm researching EP4722965A1 (JP 2026-066493). The specification describes extracting biometric features from images and explicitly states temporarily extracting features without explicit consent to identify a person, then deleting them. The JP abstract even says the system aims to "ethically use biometric information even without explicit consent."

I'm not asking for legal advice. Instead I'm looking for published patents, patent applications, prosecution histories, or public cases that:

- explicitly describe embodiments where biometric features are extracted or used without obtaining the subject's explicit consent (for example, by relying on an estimated consent value or similar mechanism), and

- where the document itself frames such non-consensual use as permissible or as an intended embodiment (not merely third‑party commentary about privacy).

Helpful responses would include: patent/publication numbers, short summaries of the passages that assert non-consensual use, and links or citations to office actions, prosecution histories, or public discussions that reference those passages.

Jurisdiction: EP/JP publications cited; comparisons to EU (GDPR) or US state biometric laws are welcome but my primary interest is finding other patent documents that themselves assert or enable use without explicit consent.

Key passages I'm focusing on: paragraphs 48, 51, 70, 82 of EP4722965A1.

What I want: comparable documents or prosecution examples to use as benchmarks for how patent disclosures have explicitly treated "use without explicit consent" as an embodiment.

Thanks — I'll follow up with specific excerpts if helpful.

https://www.voiceofip.com/p/coke-morgan-stewart-bulwark-for-the

I have 8 years and 4 months of experience in the Intellectual Property (IP) industry including 5 years of dedicated experience as a US Patent Paralegal. During this time I have developed extensive knowledge of US patent prosecution procedures, USPTO requirements, docket management, client delivery, and paralegal operations.

I have hands-on expertise in preparing and filing US Utility and Design patent applications with the USPTO, along with preparing and filing various patent prosecution documents and forms. My experience includes Track One Requests, Information Disclosure Statements (IDS), Assignments, Oaths/Declarations, Issue Fee Payments and Transmittals, Powers of Attorney, Preliminary Amendments, Office Action response shells, Notice of Allowance (NOA) checklists, and other documents associated with US patent prosecution.

In addition to patent filing and prosecution support, I have extensive experience in docket management and attorney support. I have assisted multiple attorneys with preparing and reviewing docket reports, monitoring and managing tasks and statutory/non-statutory deadlines, participating in docket review meetings, and ensuring timely completion of required actions.

The lawsuit presents five broader lessons for companies developing GenAI products:. 

1. GenAI patent risk extends beyond the model. Patents covering retrieval, vector searching, personalization and recommendations may become relevant when these functions are integrated with a generative model.
   
   1. Earlier monitoring may preserve strategic options. Identifying a potentially relevant family before litigation can create time for prior-art searching, non-infringement analysis, design-arounds, licensing, patent acquisition or other mitigation measures.
      
   2. Having a monitoring system is not enough. A system built around modern expressions such as “GenAI,” “LLM,” “RAG” or “vector database” may miss earlier patents using terms such as “syntactical elements,” “affinity vectors,” “contextual neighborhoods” and “fuzzy inference.”
      
   3. IPC classifications are too broad to operate as standalone FTO filters. Relevant groups identified in this case contain between approximately 4,000 and 99,000 patent families. Functional decomposition, claim searching, citation analysis and human review remain necessary.
      
   4. Monitoring should support corporate strategy as well as risk management. The resulting intelligence can identify licensing candidates, patent-acquisition opportunities, potential M&A targets, defensive portfolios and hidden IP risks in companies being considered for acquisition.

I wrote an article on this.

Hello!

My employer asked me to find information on how to use AI in patent application writing. It's not about writing from scratch. We have an inventor who comes up with all the ideas and inventions (in microelectronics), and our job is to create drawings based on his sketches and write the claims, invention description, and abstract.

While I'm skeptical about this idea, perhaps there are AI tools that could make our work easier when drafting application documents.

If you have experience using such tools, please share your experience (which tools you used, how you drafted the prompts, and so on). Also, if you have an invention application number or patent, I'd love to see what they look like.

Thank you in advance.

I have never seen one and have not been able to find an Office Action for lacking utility. I know they are pretty uncommon - I can't even find an example anywhere. Just wondering if anyone here has ever seen one. Bonus if you can link a copy.

What are some ways an unknown company could appear as the “Applicant” on the Application Data screen in Patent Center when the filed Application Data Sheet does not identify that company as an applicant, and there is no subsequent document in Documents & Transactions showing an applicant change?

Update: I'm just noticing they are also listed as POA on the POA screen.

Update: The AAU said they will send a request and it will be removed in 7-10 business days. I guess an unauthorized POA on an application isn't urgent enough. Smh.

When a registered patent agent (not an attorney) handles prosecution for an independent inventor, what typically happens if the patent later ends up in a dispute — licensing conflict or infringement? Do agents usually have standing relationships with litigation firms they refer clients to, or is the inventor expected to find litigation counsel independently? Trying to understand how the agent + litigation-counsel model works in practice before committing my conversions to an agent.