Lifeline of a granted patent is regular maintenance and renewal of the application in a timely manner. Missing the maintenance timeline means abandoning the Patent before its expiry. Patracode manages the renewals in a timely manner through its in-house state of art procedure and technical platform.
A patent life is ideally set within 20 years from the date of filing the patent application, and the renewals of it should be done by a payment of its maintenance charges regularly on a particular date set by the patent office that depends on the filing and grant of a patent. The amount varies from country to country. And when one has numerous patents, to maintain it becomes a hectic task, for executing its patent portfolio.
Maintaining the portfolio is important; however it is a batch task having its own complexities; hence it is always suggestible to maintain the patent using an outside agency having expertise in handling renewal task which involves communicating and paying to different authorities in the local currencies of the authority. We support you not in just payments, but with budgeting for renewal tasks.
For budgeting, we send you across a form to be filled in by you with respect to the Patent families to be renewed. On entering the families, we calculate an approximate figure you need to allocate for renewals. Post receiving your interest, we keep sending you monthly proposals for patents to be renewed in a coming month.
Once we receive a purchase order with respect to the proposal, we move ahead to pay the annuities. Subsequent to which we raise the bills to be settled by you by end of the month, along with receipt of annuities payment for your docketing. We keep one copy of the receipts with us, so that we can maintain the records of the payments for your future perusals.
In India, the first patent renewal fees or the maintenance fees should be paid, once a grant is given to a patent, after which the applicant should pay the grant fee including the years since filing a patent took to receive the grant, but for the first two years. For example: If a patent is filed in 1st January 2000, and is approved to be granted in 3rd July 2003, the applicant should pay the grant fee, along with the maintenance fee from 2003.
In case, the grant happens in 2002 itself, say 31st October 2002, at the time of grant the grant fees shall be payable, and the maintenance fees shall be payable before 1st January, 2003. This timeline of fee payment has maximum six months extension period, however a prescribed fees for extension has to be filed along with the renewals.
On recording of Patent in the register of the Patents, the grant along with renewal fees is payable in three months, with maximum extension up to nine months from recorded date along with prescribed extension fees. One peculiar thing about Patent renewals is that with the years annuity fees keeps on increasing, and it’s a matter of worth to look into whether you are really working over the patent and interested to maintain it. The money saved can surely be used to maintain potential technologies and prosecuting important patent applications.
