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Intellectual Property Law

: IPKat

PCT Billing Scams

By Johanna Gibson, David Pearce, Jeremy Phillips and Ilanah Simon.

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According to a WIPO press release issued recently, a Florida-based company, ?Federated Institute for Patent and Trademark Registry? (FIPTR), has been caught running various scams involving sending out misleading letters to IP rights holders that look like invoices. Some of these were aimed at applicants for international patent applications, but many others involved requests for payment for supposedly registering trade mark rights and copyrights. These services had, of course, no value.

All this comes as welcome news to the IPKat's ears, but he suspects that there are many more unscrupulous operators out there who will be carrying on regardless. From recent personal experience he knows of at least two that are currently operating, one being known as International Bureau for Intellectual Property (their logo is pictured here on the left), the other known as the Register of International Patents. Redacted example letters from each can be viewed here and here, courtesy of the IPKat's Google Groups file server. The client in each case was, of course, told to ignore the letters but the IPKat has a nagging feeling that perhaps not all clients would be sufficiently suspicious of such official-looking letters.

Bearing in mind the similar trade-mark related scam the IPKat reported here, do the IPKat's readers have any further thoughts, examples of other similar scam merchants, or perhaps any ideas of what to do with them?

Full post as published by IPKat on December 23, 2009 (boomark / email).

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