Recently I blogged with a recommendation that readers migrate their $40 or $55 per month landlines to VOIP lines that cost as little as 85¢ per month. In response, alert reader and Portuguese and European patent attorney Luís Ferreira asked:
What about security? SIP communications are not normally encrypted?
His questions are good questions. Here are a few partial answers.
We reduced our firm’s $160 per month phone bill for four telephone lines to 85¢ per month. Continue reading
CLockwise from top left: Ooma, Vonage, Cisco, Magicjack, Obihai
If you are going to use VOIP (which probably you should do, since it is the wave of the future), you might need one or more ATAs (analog telephone adapters). If so, this article offers my recommendation of which one to pick.
A colleague at a very well known patent firm asks this:
Some of our clients (a few very large, sophisticated patent clients) refuse to let us move from PCT-Safe to ePCT for their matters since they claim the ePCT servers are located outside the US and that, at a minimum, a foreign-filing license would first be required prior to filing. Do you have any related experiences with clients? If so, how did you address their concerns?
First let me offer a compliment to those companies. It is really good that they think about the FFL issue. A company (or a practitioner) that fails to pay attention to FFL issues can really run into trouble later. Continue reading
I’m just headed over to Opera Samfaina for the e-Trademarks listserv reception. Hope to see everyone there!
(click to enlarge)
(click to enlarge)
Meet the Bloggers XIII was a success! The reception was on the beach in Barcelona. The surf crashed on the sand. Cruise ships and sailboats passed by on the ocean. Tapas and beverages were consumed. Over a hundred people attended.
One more event to attend and then you can feel you have accomplished nearly all of your INTA goals. Yes, the e-Trademarks listserv reception lies ahead, tomorrow (Tuesday) evening.
Hopefully everybody who is in Barcelona for the INTA meeting already has their ribbons to attend the two must-attend receptions:
The weather in Barcelona is delightful just now. MTB XIII will be at Xup Xup which is a beachfront venue. The e-Trademarks reception will be at Opera Samfina which is in the middle of La Rambla.
See you there!
If you only attend two events in Barcelona during the INTA meeting, these are the two events to attend … Continue reading
The landscape for VPN routers has changed over the years. As of a few years ago, sophisticated VPN routers with IPSEC were ethernet-only. Continue reading
(Updated to include screen shot from USPTO’s dashboard, thanks to Ken Boone.)
The post-registration branch at the USPTO — the group of people whose job it is to look at a six-year renewal or a ten-year renewal — sure is slow sometimes.
We have one where we filed our renewal on March 22, 2017. The post-reg people accepted it on May 9, 2017 (which is what prompted today’s blog post). Actually that was only six or seven weeks which was faster than many cases. We had one recently that took almost five months to get looked at. We filed the renewal on October 18, 2016 and it did not get looked at until April 4, 2017.
The problem of course is that if post-reg takes five months to look at a renewal, and if post-reg finds some real or imagined flaw in the renewal papers, then there is precious little time to try to straighten things out. In this case with the delay of almost five months, the post-reg person bounced the renewal because of a flaw that was merely imagined, not real. We argued with the post-reg person, but we had our backs against the wall because the renewal window was going to expire in just a few days. Fortunately the post-reg person withdrew the bounce. But still this forced the client to endure uncertainty for almost five months, for no good reason.
It sure will be good when the USPTO gets the post-reg branch back to normal.