Dealing with change from patent application to "certificat d'utilité"

[papoteur-mga]

According to the French law, it is possible to change a patent application in a Certificat d'utilité. This is a relative current practice.
How to manage it in phpIP?
The direct edition of the patent matter is not allowed, because the calculation of tasks would be deficient.
The only way I see is to create a new matter, which is not very satisfying, because it is not really a new case, and it will have a different caseref. Even by trying to create a descendant, when changing the category Patent to Utility model, the number is changed to a new one.

Thus, I think we have to create this way to change the category for the matter. This will be to the user to manage the remaining task. For the renewal, it would be useful to delete them and recalculate them. The expiration date has to be computed again.

@jjdejong An other idea?

Is there other configurations of concern?

[srdco]

Just a thought here that this could also be useful in the US, where you can convert a provisional to a non-provisional application within 14(?) months of filing. It's relatively rare, but it does happen (e.g., when you need the priority date of the provisional for a design patent application). I wonder if this functionality is introduced if it could be extended to other functions? Maybe a separate workflow could be defined with a 'conversion' (mapping the old to the new) and events / tasks that should be recalculated? I'm also wondering if there could be a case level notes field that the old events/tasks could be dumped into in serialized text format for reference in case something went wrong?

[jjdejong]

Just a thought here that this could also be useful in the US, where you
can convert a provisional to a non-provisional application within 14(?)
months of filing.

My understanding of provisional patents in the US is that they automatically expire in one year, whatever happens. The "conversion" process is just to file a non-provisional within the year, claiming the priority of the provisional. So the later non-provisional filing is a new standard filing under Convention priority, not a "true" conversion of the provisional itself.

[jjdejong]

According to the French law, it is possible to change a patent application in a Certificat d'utilité. This is a relative current practice.

"Current practice"? Never done it in 35 years! I'd simply create a "Utility model conversion" event and change the expiry date by hand.