January 2026 – Ant-Like Persistence

Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC (“OPLF”) sponsors many listservs (email discussion groups for intellectual property professionals, here is a list of them), some with over a thousand members. In recent days, hundreds of members of the listservs have started to receive email messages that prompted questions, such as:

I received an email, and I need to know whether it is a phishing hack. If it’s legitimate, I will respond accordingly.

Another listserv member responded:

Got same thing yesterday. Is real. The question is why.

What do these emails mean? Why are the listserv members receiving the emails? How should listserv members respond? In this blog posting, I try to answer these questions. Continue reading “Should the listserv member click on the link? Is it spearphishing?”

I was paying an Issue Fee in Patent Center, I clicked “submit”, and at right you can see what happened next. “There was an error”.

That’s it. The developers of Patent Center want me to know that “There was an error.”

Well, now I know. There was an error.

What really deserves comment here is the state of mind of the developers when they designed this error message. Somebody somewhere at the USPTO, when they were coding this line of code, said “well, I guess I need to choose the text of this error message.” And this person decided that the way to explain what had gone wrong was to use these four words.

You could ask a twelve-year-old child “is this an acceptable error message?” and the child would say “no it is not”. Continue reading “USPTO’s Patent Center says: “There was an error””