Brazil's National Institute of Industrial Property (INPI) announced at 13:50 local time on 29 October that some of its electronic services were temporarily unavailable and that its technical team was working to restore them. Citing article 6 of Portaria INPI/PR No. 049 of 3 December 2021, under which deadlines falling due on a day when a technical outage of more than 60 continuous minutes is confirmed are automatically restored, INPI stated that deadlines due on 29 October will be restored automatically.
Once services are back to normal, INPI will publish an unavailability report setting out the period of the interruption and how deadlines are being restored. At the time of writing, the report for 29 October had not yet been published.
The third outage this month
This is the third time in October that INPI has announced an outage of its electronic services. For the outage on 1 to 2 October, it issued a technical unavailability report on 2 October once the systems were back; for the outage on 19 to 20 October, services returned at around 20:00 on 20 October and the report followed on 21 October.
J&C recommends that applicants with trade mark, patent or other cases in Brazil do not leave responses or fee payments originally due on 29 October to the last minute just because the deadline will be restored. Confirm the new deadline against the unavailability report INPI publishes and the applicable rules, and file as soon as the systems are back. If deadlines on 1 to 2 or 19 to 20 October were also affected, check them against the two reports INPI has already issued.
Source: www.gov.br | www.gov.br | www.gov.br
