Month: June 2015

Posted on

Patent Trial and Appeal Board announces two-for-one sale

How did this two-for-one sale actually work out?  See my follow-on posting about this program.

US patent practitioners will recall a two-for-one sale offered by the USPTO’s Examining Corps back in 2011.  At that time the backlog of unexamined applications was so embarrassing that the USPTO came up with “Project Exchange”, aka the two-for-one sale.  That program offered an opportunity to get fast examination of a first case that was pending as of October of 2009, so long as the applicant expressly abandoned a second case that was likewise pending as of October of 2009.

Taking a page from that play book, the Patent Trial and Appeal Board has announced its own two-for-one sale, called the “Expedited Patent Appeal Pilot”.  If you have two ex parte appeals pending before the PTAB, you can abandon one of them and the PTAB will decide the other appeal fast.

Continue reading “Patent Trial and Appeal Board announces two-for-one sale”

Posted on

USPTO’s new Patent Application Alert Service

USPTO and Reed Tech have announced an interesting alert service.  You go to this web page and create a user ID.  And you set up one or more search terms of interest.  Every Thursday, when USPTO releases another set of published patent applications, the system will use your search terms and will let you know if there is some matching published patent application.

 

Posted on

Amending a US application that Is the basis of an IR?

A member of the E-Trademarks listserv asked this:

I have never filed via the Madrid Protocol, but I am considering filing one based on a recently filed US application. If the listing of goods in the US application are amended, are the IR and the subsequent designations automatically amended so that the goods are always the same? It would seem weird to have an IR and national designations with a different listing of goods.

Continue reading “Amending a US application that Is the basis of an IR?”

Posted on

USPTO still an SSL laggard

In August of 2014 I blogged that USPTO needed to implement SSL (“https://”) on all of its public-facing web sites.  I also said that USPTO needed to implement PFS on all of its SSL-enabled web sites.  (SSL and PFS are security features that protect visitors from eavesdropping by third parties around the Internet.)  In that blog article I explained in detail why this is important.  As just one of many examples of why this is important, the way things are now at the USPTO, third parties could eavesdrop and learn what search terms you are using when you search for a patent or a trademark registration.

Ten months have passed.  It is now June of 2015 and USPTO has made no progress on this.  None.  Zip. Every USPTO web site that was vulnerable to this sort of eavesdropping in August of 2014 continues to be vulnerable today in June of 2015.

Now comes a directive from the White House saying the same thing now in June 2015 that I said in August of 2014.  The directive tells all federal agencies that “all publicly accessible Federal websites and web services” must “only provide service through a secure connection” meaning https://.  All agencies, including the USPTO, are required to get this done by December 31, 2016.

Let’s see how promptly the USPTO complies with this directive from the White House.

Posted on

What’s the Best Practice for 92bis changes?

One of many nice things about the PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) system is that you can do one-stop shopping for changes in the bibliographic data.  (In a somewhat similar way, the Madrid Protocol and Hague Agreement systems provide one-stop shopping for assignments and owner address changes.)  By filing a so-called Rule 92bis request, you can update the inventor list, the name of the applicant, and/or addresses and citizenships thereof.

When I say “one-stop shopping” I mean that you do the change once and it covers multiple countries or Offices around the world.  

But there are better and worse ways to carry out your 92bis request, and that’s the point of this blog posting.

Continue reading “What’s the Best Practice for 92bis changes?”