Month: December 2021

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All USPTO systems are broken – you can’t make this stuff up

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All USPTO systems are broken right now.  They are broken so badly that the USPTO has in desperation authorized filing new patent applications by email and filing new trademark applications by email.  

The USPTO has never in all of the years that I have been in practice taken this profoundly embarrassing step of authorizing e-filing of new patent applications or new trademark applications by email.  

Take a look at my blog article from two days ago where I recounted four times over the span of several years where the “contingency” server for e-filing patent applications had failed at the same time as the main server.  Why?  Because the backup server was in the same room, plugged into the same electrical outlet, connected to the same Internet connection, as the main server.  In the year 2021 you could ask any alert schoolchild how to avoid such a debacle, and the schoolchild would be able to tell you, don’t put them in the same room, don’t plug them into the same electrical outlet, don’t use the same Internet connection for both of them.

The photograph above is a photograph that I used in a blog article from the year 2015, when I tried to shame the USPTO into moving its “contingency” server to a geographically distant location.  That was six years ago.

And now today every external-facing USPTO system is broken.  Every redundant server is broken, just like the main server that it is supposed to be providing a backup for.  And by now the USPTO people are so embarrassed by this that they have violated 37 CFR § 1.8 and 37 CFR § 1.10 by authorizing the filing of new US patent applications by email.  It is ultra vires, but I cannot imagine any patent applicant who needs a filing date today complaining.  Arguably the Director will at some point sign some nunc pro tunc order under 37 CFR § 1.183 waiving all rules retroactively so that every newly filed patent application or trademark application that got filed by email will be given its filing date.

Anyway, let’s all look at the photograph above and ask ourselves what there is about that photograph that nobody at the USPTO was able to understand back in 2015 when I presented the photograph to them in 2015.

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Who invented Liquid Paper?

Life is filled with reasons to be gobsmacked.  We all read recently of the death of Michael Nesmith, one of the members of The Monkees, at the age of 78.  He left many marks on Western culture.  I personally think that of the many strong marks he left on Western culture, the strongest were:

  • He was one of the producers of Repo Man, a film that became a cult classic and influenced many directors and actors thereafter.
  • He wrote the song Different Drum which launched and then enabled the career of Linda Ronstadt.

But what gobsmacked me was to learn that Michael Nesmith’s mother was the inventor of Liquid Paper.  By now in the year 2021 we are sort of accustomed, or maybe even resigned, to learning over and over again that somebody who was female accomplished something back in the days when many members of society seemed to assume that only males could accomplish things.  But it was his mother, Bette Nesmith Graham, who invented Liquid Paper, which inspired all of the later typewriter correction fluid products.  Of course nowadays because of word processors and computer printers, we have a whole generation of today’s youth who maybe have no reason to know that there was even a problem for which a typewriter correction fluid product might be the solution.   

Typewriter correction fluid played an important part of my professional life for decades.  In the early days of my law firm, we went though many bottles of typewriter correction fluid.

You can read about Bette Nesmith Graham in this Wikipedia article.

 

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Trap for the unwary effective January 1, 2022 – EPO and USPTO and priority documents

Folks, the USPTO is going to pull the plug on the PDX system on January 1, 2022.  I blogged about this here.  This was in part due to the efforts of The Thirty-One Patent Practitioners.  You can read about the pulling-of-the-plug on the USPTO web site here.  In almost every way this is very good news:

  • You will be able to set a tripwire to let you know the moment the USPTO tries to retrieve the electronic certified copy of the EP priority document.
  • A log will be available to you that keeps a history of the USPTO’s retrieval of the electronic certified copy of the EP priority document.
  • You will be able to independently confirm ahead of time that the electronic certified copy of the EP priority document is indeed available to the USPTO, so as to eliminate any question about the ability of the USPTO say that it supposedly cannot retrieve the electronic certified copy.

But there is one way that this is a potential trap for the unwary, and that is the purpose of this blog article.  You should probably forward this blog article to every patent practitioner that you know who ever files a US patent application that claims priority from an EP patent application.  Continue reading “Trap for the unwary effective January 1, 2022 – EPO and USPTO and priority documents”

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The Thirty-One Patent Practitioners got their third “ask” about DAS

I am sure that many loyal readers of this blog have been following closely the progress of the Commissioner for Patents in following through on the four “asks” about the DAS system that The Thirty-One Patent Practitioners presented in their request letter dated February 22, 2020.  Right?  Of course you have been following this closely.  The good news is that today the Commissioner for Patents moved forward on the third of the “asks”.  The Commissioner has announced that he will pull the plug on the PDX system.  This is good news for patent applicants and patent practitioners, as I will describe, and we all owe a note of thanks to those thirty-one patent practitioners for nudging the Commissioner along on this.  Continue reading “The Thirty-One Patent Practitioners got their third “ask” about DAS”

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A curious Notice of Proposed Rulemaking at the USPTO

I choose to take partial credit, in an odd way, for a curious Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that the USPTO publicized today.  The Notice proposes to change the Rule that defines what filing date you get when you e-file something about patents at the USPTO.  The Rule presently contains some word salad that works out to something like “you get what time it is at the e-filing server in Alexandria, Virginia when you click ‘submit'”.  The proposed new Rule contains some word salad that works out to something like “you get what time it is in the Eastern Time Zone when you click ‘submit'”.  I think my April 1, 2016 blog post, in which I joked that the USPTO had moved its “contingency” patent e-filing server to the Denver patent office, is a partial cause of this Notice.  Continue reading “A curious Notice of Proposed Rulemaking at the USPTO”

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You can sign a letter about Patentcenter to the Acting Director of the USPTO

(Update:  the letter got sent.  See blog article.)

Maybe you have made use of Patentcenter, and have been disappointed with it.  Maybe you have seen the ever-growing list of Patentcenter trouble tickets. Maybe you are aware of the Patentcenter listserv, a group of users of Patentcenter that hopes to help the USPTO with correcting the bugs in Patentcenter.  Maybe you are aware that the USPTO has not been very responsive to repeated efforts by the listserv to set up two-way communications about Patentcenter.

You could help with this by signing a letter to the Acting Director of the USPTO, Drew Hirshfeld.  You can see the letter here.  The letter will close for signatures in two days (Wednesday the 15th) and will get sent on Thursday the 16th.

 

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Inexpensive yet clever smart watches

A smart watch is a watch that connects by bluetooth to your smart phone, and does lots of smart things.  It was not so long ago that your usual smart watch cost many hundreds of dollars.  Recently I saw that there are lots and lots of relatively inexpensive smart watches on the market.  I decided to give one of them a try.  I was astonished to find how many features a person can get, and how clever the watch can be, for a quite modest purchase price.  Continue reading “Inexpensive yet clever smart watches”

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Cereal box got smaller but price stays the same (USPTO Director’s blog)

35 USC § 153 says:

Patents shall be issued in the name of the United States of America, under the seal of the Patent and Trademark Office, and shall be signed by the Director or have his signature placed thereon and shall be recorded in the Patent and Trademark Office.

For as long as I have been in practice, such patents have arrived in the postal mail approximately every Friday, following the Tuesday of issuance.  We call them “ribbon copies” because on the cover, they have a gold seal and they used to have a representation of a red ribbon.  I review the patents each week, often with some sense of satisfaction at having played some small part in the process of obtaining the patent from the USPTO on behalf of the client.  We then ship each patent to the client, with a cover letter solemnly advising the client that the patent should be kept safely “among the client’s important papers”.

It seems this will come to an end, according to a new article has been posted to the blog of the Director of the USPTO. Continue reading “Cereal box got smaller but price stays the same (USPTO Director’s blog)”

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Webinar recording now available: Picking an International Searching Authority

So you missed the CLE-accredited webinar about the Patent Cooperation Treaty that took place on Wednesday, December 8, 2021 entitled Picking an International Searching Authority?  Well, all is not lost.  You can download the program materials here and you can view the video recording here.  It is unlikely you will ever find anyplace that offers a comparable 86 minutes of discussion of this fascinating topic.  As a reminder this recording is provided free of charge, courtesy of the World Intellectual Property Organization.  You might be able to view it directly in your web browser here:

 

Here is a description:  Continue reading “Webinar recording now available: Picking an International Searching Authority”

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Only 900 slots still open for tomorrow’s webinar

There are only about 900 slots still open for tomorrow’s ethics CLE program Securing electronic communications.

If you wait too long to register, maybe you would be the 901st and you would find the webinar to be full.  Yeah, right.

Anyway, maybe somebody is scrambling around to pick up a couple of CLE units before the end of the year.  Maybe even a couple of ethics CLE units before the end of the year.  If so, this might be just the ticket.  For more information, or to register, click here.