Intellectual Property
The Intellectual Property Law department at the national general practice law firm of Charles Jerome Ware, P.A., Attorneys and Counsellors, is headed by Alan J. Kennedy, who is formerly of the Intellectual Property, Commercial and International Law Practice Group at NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) as well as the General Counsel's Office at Xerox.
Our attorneys are committed to accomplishing good results and achieving innovative remedies for our clients.
"FIRST TO FILE" BEGINS ON MARCH 16, 2013
The America Invents Act (AIA) which was signed into law by President Barack Obama on September 16, 2011, finally puts the U.S. Patent System's 'First-to-File" system into operation on March 16, 2013.
The law will switch U.S. rights to a patent from the present "first-to-invent" system to a "first inventor-to-file" system for patent applications filed on or after March 16, 2013.
The law also expands the definition of prior art used in determining patentability. Actions and prior art that bar patentability will include public use, sales, publications, and other disclosures available to the public anywhere in the world as of the filing date, other than publications by the inventor within one year of filing (inventor's "publication-conditioned grace period"), whether or not a third party also files a patent application.
The law also notably expands prior art to include foreign offers for sale and public uses. Applicants that do not publish their inventions prior to filing will receive no grace period.
The proceedings at the U.S. Patent Office for resolving priority contests among near-simultaneous inventors who both file applications for the same invention ("interference proceedings") are repealed, because priority will be determined based on filing date.
An administrative proceeding—called a “derivation” proceeding, similar to that currently used within some interference proceedings is provided to ensure that the first person to file the application is actually an original inventor and that the application was not derived from another inventor.
The AIA refers to the new regime as "First-Inventor-to-File (FITF)". This new regime operates differently than the "First-to-Invent" (FTI) regime currently in effect in the U.S. and the various "First-to-File" (FTF) regimes in place in the rest of the world. Different outcomes that can occur under each of these three different regimes, depending on whether and how two different inventors would publish or file patent applications.
[www.lexology.com/library/"First-to-File Starts on March 16, 2013"; www.laipla.net/"Filing Parent Applications After The March 16, 2013, First-to-File Transition Date"]
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