The New Zealand Patent Office (i.e. the Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand, IPONZ) has been declared closed on Tuesday, 27 and Wednesday, 28 September 2011.The reason for the closure is an outage of a number of online systems operated by the New Zealand Ministry of Economic Development (MED) which occurred during preparation work on Saturday evening to upgrade the servers hosting these websites. The websites will be unavailable until at least midday on Wednesday 28 September (New Zealand time, of course).
Due to the decision to declare IPONZ closed, if a deadline for filing an application or document falls on Tuesday or Wednesday this week, then the application or document can be filed on the next day when the Patent Office is open (i.e. Thursday) and will be deemed to have been filed in time.
Due to the short notice, however, IPONZ is open today (26 September 2011), despite the unavailability of its online systems. Email communications remain available (to mail@iponz.govt.nz). The MED notice indicates that requests for extensions of time to meet deadlines falling today are likely to be viewed favourably by IPONZ, so long as they meet the normal requirements, including the provision of a reasonable explanation as to why the deadline was missed.
Full details of the impact of the outage, and the implications of the IPONZ closure, are available in a notice on a (working) MED website.
Before You Go…
Thank you for reading this article to the end – I hope you enjoyed it, and found it useful. Almost every article I post here takes a few hours of my time to research and write, and I have never felt the need to ask for anything in return.
But now – for the first, and perhaps only, time – I am asking for a favour. If you are a patent attorney, examiner, or other professional who is experienced in reading and interpreting patent claims, I could really use your help with my PhD research. My project involves applying artificial intelligence to analyse patent claim scope systematically, with the goal of better understanding how different legal and regulatory choices influence the boundaries of patent protection. But I need data to train my models, and that is where you can potentially assist me. If every qualified person who reads this request could spare just a couple of hours over the next few weeks, I could gather all the data I need.
The task itself is straightforward and web-based – I am asking participants to compare pairs of patent claims and evaluate their relative scope, using an online application that I have designed and implemented over the past few months. No special knowledge is required beyond the ability to read and understand patent claims in technical fields with which you are familiar. You might even find it to be fun!
There is more information on the project website, at claimscopeproject.net. In particular, you can read:
- a detailed description of the study, its goals and benefits; and
- instructions for the use of the online claim comparison application.
Thank you for considering this request!
Mark Summerfield
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