Month: August 2014

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Let’s get those TEAS forms e-signed today

As a reminder, any TEAS form that needs e-signing will get thrown away at the USPTO tonight.  USPTO has scheduled a server reboot for tomorrow (Saturday the 23rd) in which all of the outstanding TEAS forms will get thrown away.

So the smart thing to do today is to chase after your clients and get your outstanding TEAS forms e-signed today.  (And you need to get the forms e-filed right away after they have been e-signed.)  Otherwise if the form remains unsigned and unfiled by the end of the day, you will have to start over again on Monday.

I guess the other smart thing to do today, if you have not already done so, is to subscribe to this blog! ☺  Just go to the upper-right corner where it says “Subscribe to blog via email”.

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US Trademark Office needs to stop publishing IP addresses linked to email addresses

(Followup — USPTO did the right thing and stopped publishing IP addresses.  See this blog post.)

Those who read the previous posting, about the need for USPTO to implement SSL and PFS on all of its outward-facing e-commerce systems, will have heard of the suspicion that a company is eavesdropping on TESS sessions and then uses the results of the eavesdropping in emailed sales pitches.  The alert reader will wonder how it is that such an eavesdropper would be able to figure out what email address to use to reach someone at an otherwise seemingly random IP address.  The answer is that the US Trademark Office needs to stop publishing IP addresses linked to email addresses.

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USPTO needs to implement SSL and PFS on all servers

The USPTO needs to implement SSL and PFS on all of its public-facing servers.  In plain language all of the servers at USPTO need to use “https://” rather than “https://”.  Why?  Because apparently there are eavesdroppers.  See this report from a member of the E-Trademarks listserv:

The company TMFeatures really has figured out how to decipher what we are searching, and I am very concerned.  I am working on a very sensitive global launch for a client, and I received an email this afternoon from this company which makes it clear that it knows exactly what I have pulled up on the public USPTO TESS database.  How can that happen?   If a company is able to compile a list of the marks we have pulled up, it would not be hard to make a very good case of competitive intelligence available for the right price.   I assume this would be much worse for single industry in-house trademark counsel than us outside people, but still very concerning.

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EFS-Web broken again

USPTO has had another system crash.  EFS-Web is broken again.  It crashed at about 6AM this morning, Saturday, August 9.

Practitioners will recall the big USPTO system crash on Wednesday, May 14 (blog) in which EFS-Web was broken but also EFS-Web Contingency was broken.

In today’s system crash, EFS-Web is broken but EFS-Web Contingency is still working.  So today’s crash at the USPTO is not quite as bad as the May 14 crash.

The USPTO maintains a USPTO Systems Status and Availability page which supposedly provides “the latest information on operating status and availability of Online Business Systems.”  The USPTO failed that promise again today.  At no time during this six-hour outage did the SSAA page give any acknowledgement that EFS-Web had crashed.

What are the workarounds when EFS-Web crashes like this?

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Trademark Office being helpful

Do you sometimes prepare a submission in USPTO’s TEAS system, and send it to a client so that the client may review it and maybe e-sign it?  (Examples of such a submission might include the filing of a new US trademark application or the filing of a Statement of Use.)   If so, then during the next two weeks you may wish to carry out that task in a slightly different way than the usual way.  The nice thing is that the Trademark Office is being helpful to its customers by letting them know in advance of something important that will happen about two weeks from now.

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