Month: August 2014

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”.

(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.

Continue reading “US Trademark Office needs to stop publishing IP addresses linked to email addresses”

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.

Continue reading “Trademark Office being helpful”

It is all too easy for an intellectual property practitioner in the US to fall into the bad habit of assuming that everything about IP is the same in every state of the US.  The other day a discussion in the E-Trademarks listserv offered a reminder of a particularly nasty trap for the unwary — the terrifying New York definition of a franchise.

Continue reading “The Terrifying New York Definition of a Franchise”