Month: September 2018

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Oppedahl Patent Law Firm Listservs are broken

Update:  The listservs are working again.

I’ve learned that our listservs (email discussion groups) are broken.

Our listservs are hosted by a hosting company in Boulder, Colorado.  The hosting company of course provides services to others besides us.  I did some troubleshooting, and I see that the IP address from which the listserv emails get sent has gotten blacklisted by one of the spam blacklisting services.

The blacklisting service has good intentions, of course.  The service tries to notice patterns of email sending so that spammers can be identified and blocked.

I’d guess that some new customer of the hosting company started sending spam.

Now the hosting company will have to figure out which new customer is sending the spam, and shut them down.  And then the hosting company will have to ask the blacklisting service to re-evaluate the email traffic for the IP address.   And eventually the IP address will be removed from the blacklist.  And then our listservs will start working again.

Sigh.

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Are you a practitioner in Silicon Valley? Did you not receive this post card?

click to enlarge

Recently I mailed post cards to nearly all of the people in Silicon Valley who are admitted to practice before the USPTO.  This was about 4000 post cards.

By  now, about 400 of these post cards have been returned to sender as undeliverable.   Ten percent!

For each of these mailing addresses, it means the practitioner’s address with the Office of Enrollment and Discipline is undeliverable.  As I flip quickly through this stack of several hundred returned cards, I see names of very well known law firms and very well known high-tech companies.

So the point of this post is that if you did not receive one of these post cards, you might want to look in the the OED database to see if your mailing address with the OED is out of date.

If you are located outside of Silicon Valley and you know someone who is a registered practitioner in Silicon Valley, you might want to ask them if they did not receive the post card, in which case they might want to look in the OED database to see if they need to update their address.

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Winding down PDX – an action step for the USPTO

This past Saturday was a big day for DAS for US design filers and for US utility patent filers, in cases that claim priority from Chinese design and utility applications.  The big development was USPTO “pulling the plug” on PDX with respect to the Chinese patent office (blog article on utility patents and blog article on design patents).

The previous “pulling the plug” for PDX was last November 2017 when USPTO pulled the plug on PDX for Japan (blog article).

Now there is more plug-pulling to do.  Eventually PDX will be a thing of the past. Continue reading “Winding down PDX – an action step for the USPTO”

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Today is the day – US design applications that claim priority from Chinese design applications

Today is the day that USPTO is pulling the plug on the PDX system with respect to the Chinese patent office.  As a consequence, today is the day that, for the first time, a US design applicant can use the DAS system to obtain an electronic certified copy of a Chinese priority design application.

I blogged about this a few days ago, and you can read more about this development in that blog article.

As of today, for a US design filer, the DAS system makes it possible to retrieve an electronic certified copy of a priority application from the following Offices:

  • China
  • Spain
  • India

Korea became a Depositing Office for designs on July 20, 2018 (blog article).  But this is no help for US design filers who wish to claim priority from a Korean design application.  Hopefully soon the USPTO will pull the plug on the PDX connection to the Korean intellectual property office, and then US design filers will be able to make use of DAS for Korean priority claims.