[Note from Carl Oppedahl: I received this text from a reader who suggested that I post it as a guest blog article. It is posted anonymously, for reasons that will become clear. Maybe you find it as interesting to read as I did!]
This is a long e-mail, but I hope that you will read it. I want to thank you for the blog that you posted last Saturday, because it saved me from a major malpractice exposure. Continue reading
Are you a user of the Madrid Protocol? Will you be in Washington, DC on Saturday, October 27?
If so, then please consider helping the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) — and yourself — by attending a focus group of US users of the Madrid system at 7AM on that day at the Washington Marriott Wardman Park hotel in Washington, DC. Although WIPO’s focus group will be held in conjunction with the AIPLA Annual Meeting, you do not need to be registered for the Annual Meeting to participate in the focus group.
Continue reading
The European Patent Office (EPO) will sponsor three seminars for US‑based patent practitioners, paralegals and their administrative staff. Continue reading
The new NAFTA agreement has some very interesting consequences for patents and trademarks. Continue reading
The fee to be paid by a US PCT filer for a search carried out by IP Australia dropped today, from $1722 to $1631.
I mentioned this in a previous blog post.
You will not need to worry about accidentally paying an incorrect fee amount, because the e-filing systems have already been updated to reflect the new fee amount. For filers in RO/US, the EFS-Web system has already been updated. And for filers in RO/IB, the ePCT system has already been updated.
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Starting from December 25, a trademark owner in Malawi can file a Madrid Protocol application to pursue protection in one or more Offices outside of Malawi. And starting from that date, a trademark owner outside of Malawi can file a Subsequent Designation to Malawi (or can file a new Madrid Protocol application designating Malawi).
It is recalled that the Patent Cooperation Treaty entered into force on January 24, 1978, initially with 18 contracting states. But perhaps not all readers appreciate that Malawi was one of those initial 18 contracting states for the PCT! Saying this differently, Malawi was more trendy, modern, and up-to-date about the PCT than most of the 152 present-day members of the PCT. Nobody joined PCT sooner than Malawi!
The two-letter code for Malawi is “MW”.
When you file a PCT application in a Receiving Office other than the RO/IB, the Receiving Office will consider whether it is “competent” to handle that particular PCT application. If the RO determines that it is non-competent, it will transfer the application to the RO/IB for further processing. (The application does not lose its filing date; the RO/IB will honor the filing date that had been given to the application by the first RO.)
Each RO determines its own conditions for “competency”. In the case of RO/US, the two ways that the RO might decide that it lacks competency as to a particular PCT application are:
Either of these situations will prompt RO/US to transfer a particular PCT application to the RO/IB.
But what, the long-suffering blog reader may ask at this point, does all of this have to do with “lorem ipsum“? Yes, those are today’s fun questions — the interesting question “what is lorem ipsum?” and the even more interesting question “what does lorem ipsum have to do with Receiving Office procedure under the Patent Cooperation Treaty?” Continue reading
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In this article I describe in quite some technical detail what happens if you were to place a telephone call to our office. In this article I also describe a failover measure that I set up today. You might want to set up a similar failover measure for your own telephone system.
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I’ve received many questions from people who have tried to use the “new, safer and simpler log-in” for PAIR and EFS-Web. (See the big blue footer that now appears whenever you try to use PAIR.) Here’s what one very experienced USPTO customer asked me:
Last week I set up two-factor authentication with MyUSPTO, following the USPTO’s instructions. Recently the big blue banner started appearing and I figured I had better start using the newer, safer and simpler log-in. So today I needed to e-file form SB39 in one of my cases. This is my time to try out the newer, safer and simpler log-in, right? I logged in at the USPTO web site using my MyUSPTO user ID and password. So far, so good. Over on the right side, it says “File patents with EFS Web”. So now that I have logged in, I click there and I reach the “unregistered e-filers” page. There are some links but none of them will get me to the “registered” EFS-Web. Finally I give up on MyUSPTO and I click on the old-fashioned link on the upper left and I click on “eFile (registered)” and that got me to the familiar old Entrust Java Applet page. I e-filed my form SB39.
When that was done I went back to the MyUSPTO home page again hoping to figure out how I might have gotten to the “registered” EFS-Web page. What did I miss?
I’ll explain. Continue reading
A long time ago the way to log in was with a user ID and password. Then people started using two-factor authentication (2FA or “something you have, and something you know”). USPTO’s particularly poor choice for 2FA was the Entrust Java Applet. After a while some organizations started using a text message on a cell phone as the second factor. This turns out to be a really poor choice as well because it is very easy to hack.
The smart way to do this nowadays is TOTP (time-based one-time password). For most people the way you do this is to install an authenticator app onto your smart phone, and you scan a QR code. The app displays a six-digit code that changes every thirty or sixty seconds. The code is the second factor.
The point of this article is to invite you to consider smarter ways to do TOTP. Continue reading