To IP professionals, "DAS" stands for "Digital Access Service", a service run by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO). As explained on WIPO's site:
"The WIPO Digital Access Service (DAS) is an electronic system allowing priority documents and similar documents to be securely exchanged between participating intellectual property (IP) offices. The system enables applicants and offices to meet the requirements of the Paris Convention for certification in an electronic environment.
"The Service is intended for use with documents related to patents, utility models, industrial designs and trademarks."
The idea is you file a patent (or design, or trademark) application in one jurisdiction, and within a specified period of time (one year for patents, generally 6 months for designs or trademarks) you can file in other jurisdictions and claim "priority" from the first filing, which means it's as if you filed that first application in the other jurisdictions on the same day you filed in the first jurisdiction.
Until the computer age, and even well into it, for such a priority claim to be effective, an applicant had to provide each foreign jurisdiction with a paper copy of the priority document, certified as authentic by the issuing patent office. This usually involved someone at the first office photocopying the document, then affixing a ribbons and seals to show that it was the real deal. Since employee time costs money, applicants had to pay for these copies. And then had to pay to send the physical copies by courier to an associate in each foreign jurisdiction of interest, who would charge for filing the document.
At some point, some IP offices made bilateral arrangements to provide each other with electronic versions of priority applications. Then WIPO introduced DAS, which is wonderful, because (a) any IP office can participate, and (b) once a participating office has uploaded the priority document to DAS, any other participating office can download a copy from DAS. Since the original copy was provided directly by the office in which the document was originally filed, the downloaded copies are certified in the sense that they're verified as authentic, and the applicant no longer has to obtain multiple certified paper copies - the one copy directly uploaded to DAS by the first office is sufficient. And no need to pay couriers or foreign associates to the document filed.
With the automation of tasks through computers, and the move of many if not most patent offices to electronic filing and record keeping, it takes almost no effort for an IP office to provide a copy of a priority document to DAS. The USPTO, for example, doesn't charge money to upload an application to DAS. If you file, say, a new provisional patent application using an Application Data Sheet (ADS), the default setting is that you're giving instructions to the USPTO to make that application available in DAS (there's a box to check to opt out, though I don't know why one would do that). If you don't use an ADS at the time of filing, you can later submit a form SB/39 instructing the USPTO to make the document available to DAS. And DAS has a feature that allows applicants to verify that the document has been uploaded to DAS.
Israel joined DAS a few years ago, several years after electronic filing of all patent applications filed by a patent practitioners (the vast majority of filings in Israel) became mandatory. But for some strange reason, not only will the Israel PTO make a priority document available via DAS only if the applicant explicitly requests that it do so, but the office continues to charge a fee as if it is preparing a paper copy of the document, even though the document was almost certainly filed in electronic form. The need to make the request, and that fee, remains reasons why I still usually do my clients' initial filings outside of Israel.
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