The last pandemic, with all its terrible consequences, has brought flexibility to the formalities applied by the Argentine Trademark and Patent Office. Electronic filing has been fully embraced and the filing requirements regarding original documents has been relaxed. Trademark and Patent Applications are now processed electronically, and paper documents are no longer required. Powers of Attorney must still be notarized and bear an Apostille, but submission of the original document is no longer mandatory (a scanned copy filed electronically will now suffice). This saves the applicants postal charges and speeds ups the whole procedure. The previous requirement by the Trademark Office to file copies of the Power of Attorney within 40 working days has now been replaced by a short reference to the date and place of signature of the Power of Attorney. Trademark applicants are not required to file the original Priority Documents nor assignment instruments.
There is also good news for patent applicants, who no longer need to provide a copy of the Priority Document at the initial stages. Furthermore, if the Country of origin of the priority application is a member of the WIPO DAS program, the patent applicant can provide a DAS code. The Argentine examiner can thus retrieve a copy of the priority document from WIPO.
These changes have significantly reduced the costs of processing trademark and patent applications in Argentina.
