Month: May 2020

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Current status of “tell us where you sleep at night?”

(Update:  a letter has been sent.  See blog article.)

On July 2, 2019, the Trademark Office at the USPTO published a Final Rule stating that as of August 3, 2019, a trademark applicant would be required to reveal where he or she sleeps at night.  I found this shocking at the time, and even now after the passage of almost a year, my sense of shock has not subsided.

What is this current status of this “tell us where you sleep at night?” requirement?  Where did it come from exactly?  To what extent can an applicant somehow protect his or her privacy and hold back from having to reveal where he or she sleeps at night? 

In this much-too-long blog article I do the best I can to answer these questions.  Continue reading “Current status of “tell us where you sleep at night?””

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Still concerned about DOCX?

(Update:  it is time for you, dear reader to consider signing another letter.  See blog posting.)

A colleague today noted that by now more than a month has passed since the last time I griped about USPTO’s DOCX activities in this blog.  He wondered if perhaps my silence was an indication that I feel the USPTO people have somehow addressed my concerns about the DOCX situation.

Just so that there is no risk of any misunderstanding about this, no, it is not the case that anything that anyone at the USPTO has done has alleviated in any way my concerns about USPTO’s DOCX plans. Continue reading “Still concerned about DOCX?”

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Monday, May 25 is a holiday at the USPTO

Monday, Monday, 25, 2020 will be a federal holiday in the District of Columbia.  This means the USPTO will be closed.  This means that any action that would be due at the USPTO on May 25 will be timely if it is done by Tuesday, May 26, 2020.

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USPTO clears two Patentcenter trouble tickets

Quite by accident today I stumbled upon the good news that USPTO fixed two bugs in Patentcenter, permitting us to clear two Patentcenter trouble tickets today.  The cleared trouble tickets are:

  • CP1 — Web-based Form 85B loses initial capitalization for assignee city name (see article)
  • CP8 – Reel number displayed wrong (see article) 

The trouble ticket page has been updated accordingly.  This leaves twenty-one outstanding trouble tickets.

Of course what we can hope for is that eventually the Patentcenter developers will establish an outbound communications channel with the beta testing community, and will let us know when they fix a bug or add a requested feature.  Until then, it will be a matter of our stumbling upon the fact of a bug having been fixed or a desirable feature having been added.

 

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Spurious “user is not enrolled” error in Patentcenter

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Patentcenter incorrectly lists every user as “not enrolled”.  Patentcenter incorrectly says that every user “cannot access customer number in Patent Center and PAIR.”

To see this, log in at Patentcenter, click on “Manage”, click on “Manage customer numbers”.  Then click on any customer number in your list.  You will see that every user is flagged as being “not enrolled”.

This is bug report CP33.

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EPO is still missing from Patentcenter Web-based ADS

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Six months have now passed since I first reported this problem to the EBC.  Still it has not been fixed.  EPO is missing from the Web-based ADS function in Patentcenter!

EPO is in the web-based ADS function in EFS-Web.   But it is missing in the corresponding function in Patentcenter.  This is bug report CP9 and you can read about it here.

This would be so very easy to fix.  It would be a matter of adding one line of text in a list item on a web page.