America-Israel Patent Law

Cat Got Your Tongue? On Hairbrushes and Hairballs

There’s a piece today in the Washington Post about how, when viewed microscopically, a cat’s tongue is seen as a perfectly-designed untangling hairbrush, which makes sense given how much time a cat spends licking its fur.  The piece ends by stating, “[this research] could bring a cat-tongue-style brush to a hair salon near you. Noel and colleagues are applying to patent their 3D tongue, and they’re planning to talk about possible uses with professionals in various fields — including the beauty industry.”

It’s possible to obtain patent protection on a hairbrush. See, e.g., US 8,627,537, which protects a detangling hairbrush that has been generally well-received, at least if youtube reviews are truthful.  And pre-Myriad/Mayo/Alice, I would have assumed that it’s possible to obtain such protection even if such a hairbrush was based on a phenomenon observed in nature.

But in the post-Mayo world?  Be careful how you claim your new brush.  Avoid telling the public how your invention is based on something found in nature (oops, too late for the people mentioned in the WaPo article).  And hope that your patent, if you ever get one, doesn’t come before Justice Breyer, who is short on both patent sense and hair.

48 hours and counting

One of the many defective aspects of the ILPTO's electronic filing system for patents is its failure to generate a downloadable receipt of submissions upon making those submissions.  You upload the the documents for filing, press submit, and then it all disappears into the ether.  Sometime later, you get an email acknowledging your submission, with the files you submitted attached. 

Typically the wait for that receipt is between 10 minutes and 2 hours, although there was an occasion a few months ago when we didn't receive the acknowledgement until about 24 hours later.  Now we've got a new winner for "longest wait for an EFS acknowledgement": on November 17 we filed a response in a case.  More than two days later, we're still waiting for the email acknowledgement of the submission. 

We're not uptight about this one: the submission is now visible on the ILPTO's public patent database.  Even if it weren't, we also paid some fees at the same time, and the system generates the fee payment acknowledgement immediately, so we have that in hand.  And we're not up against the deadline yet, so we could re-submit if needed - not that that's a particularly efficient way to work.  Regardless, we still haven't received the email acknowledging the submission.

Message to the ILPTO: fix this. The system should generate a submission receipt as soon as the submission is made. As they say in Hebrew, that's aleph-bet.