Bluesky: @oppedahl.com Mastodon.social: @ant-like
Can the title of a not-yet-published US patent application reveal technical data? Read on to see the USPTO talks out of two sides of its mouth, reaching both a “yes” and a “no” answer to this question.
Continue reading “USPTO flip-flops on whether a patent application title reveals technical data”
Our firm has been using VOIP.MS as our telephone service provider since 2017, with no regrets. Across those seven years we have saved at least twenty thousand dollars compared with what our telephone services would have cost from any other service provider. This blog article provides a reminder of one of the reasons that I like VOIP.MS, namely geographic server diversity. Continue reading “A reminder of why I like VOIP.MS as our telephone service provider”
About thirteen hours ago I posted a blog article noting that the Trademark Office made lots of mistakes when it issued six thousand trademark registrations yesterday. In that blog article, I wrote:
I imagine this blog article will eventually prompt the Trademark Office to correct its databases for the six thousand registrations that issued yesterday. I wonder how many days that will take.
The blog article also got cited in the e-Trademarks listserv.
We now have our answer. It took about thirteen hours. Just now, corrected Notices of Registration have arrived and they actually cite the registration number instead the way it was before, with a gap in the text where the registration number should be. Previously the registration number was missing from TSDR but as of now, the Trademark Office has updated TSDR to cite the registration number. Previously, the “maintenance” tab was missing but now it is there.
For those keeping score at home, no, nobody at the Trademark Office has gotten in touch to thank me for pointing out this problem.
(Update: the USPTO fixed its mistakes — see blog article.)
Yesterday (Tuesday, April 9, 2024) was registration day for two of my trademark applications. I know this because, among other things, I am in possession of the official Certificates of Registration, which the USPTO cryptographically signed on March 24, 2024. Which means that the USPTO has known the registration numbers since at least as long ago as March 24 (more than two weeks ago). But the USPTO trademark databases are broken. Continue reading “USPTO trademark databases broken”
In the old days, a POTS (plain old telephone service) telephone, also sometimes called an “analog phone”, got its dial tone from a pair of copper wires that led to a telephone company central office. The distance between the telephone and the central office might be miles. The telephone company might have sophisticated equipment in the central office that can test for faults on the telephone line, such as spurious voltages or shorted connections.
Nowadays if the customer is trendy, modern, and up-to-date, the POTS telephone will get its dial tone from an ATA (analog telephone adapter). At above right we see a functional blog diagram including an ATA. It turns out that some ATAs have sophisticated circuitry, like that in a legacy telephone company central office, that can test for faults on the telephone line, such as spurious voltages or shorted connections. Continue reading “Some VOIP analog telephone adapters are very feature-rich”
Those who entered the US patent community only recently (within, say, the past decade) could be forgiven for being unaware of something called an “interference proceeding”. Continue reading “A helpful report from Chico Gholz on pending interferences”