Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
Are you attending the AIPLA Spring 2026 meeting at the San Francisco Fairmont hotel? If so, I invite you to attend some PCT training on Wednesday, May 13 from 4PM to 6PM in the French Room. Your presenters are Hanna Kang from WIPO and yours truly. We will talk about two topics:
The training is sponsored by the PCT Issues Committee.
Here are the presentation slides for “choosing an ISA”.
It is my honor to post:
You can see them here.
What we see today is some new user-friendliness on the part of the European Patent Office. EPO is now making it even easier than before for PCT applicants to receive communications electronically from ISA/EP and IPEA/EP. Continue reading “Good news for those who use ISA/EP and IPEA/EP”
I find it interesting that nowadays, a lot of my blog traffic comes from Reddit. Continue reading “Where my blog traffic comes from?”
Two days ago I blogged (see blog article) about a hallucination on the USPTO’s new web site, namely the existence of a “provisional patent”. The web site said:
File a provisional patent
Now the USPTO has corrected the web site. Now the bullet point is:
File a provisional patent application
(Update: two days after this blog posting, the USPTO corrected its hallucination. See blog post.)
There is no such thing as a “provisional patent”. Everyone knows this. Everyone except, it turns out, the United States Patent and Trademark Office. Continue reading “USPTO hallucinates the “provisional patent””
When I was first in practice, a long time ago, the only ways to communicate with a patent examiner at the USPTO were:
The USPTO’s policy, to the extent that such a thing had been thought about at all, was that all of these kinds of communication were sufficiently secure as to satisfy national security requirements. You might file a patent application the contents of which were so sensitive that a foreign filing licence would not be granted, and it was okay that the way you sent it to the USPTO was by postal service.
But what kinds of communication are actually secure? As I discuss below, the USPTO has this kind of thing absolutely backwards. What USPTO thinks is secure is not secure, and vice versa. Continue reading “What kinds of USPTO communications are secure and not secure?”
Two USPTO people need to be retrained, and I don’t know their names. I don’t even know how to reach the supervisor of either of those USPTO people. In the old days, I would just drop an email to Kevin Little and he would straighten out this kind of problem. But he is gone and I don’t know who the new person is who does the job that he used to do.
I am hoping this blog article might reach an appropriate person at the USPTO, who could get in touch with me and could help with getting the two USPTO people retrained. And, the place in our application file where one of the people made a mistake, maybe this person could get the mistake corrected in our application file.
Here is the background and here are the details. Continue reading “Two USPTO people need to be retrained, and I don’t know their names”
For the patent practitioner who represents clients whose patent applications get rejected over Section 101, some new tools have recently been added to the practitioner’s toolbox that might help with overcoming the rejections. Continue reading “Recent tools added to the Section-101 toolbox”
We have a case in Technology Center 2100 in which we responded to a non-final Office Action on September 15, 2025.
Normally such a response would have gotten forwarded to the Examiner (by the LIE) within two or three business days.
In this case it got forwarded to the Examiner on January 16, 2026. Yes, it took more than four months for the LIE to do the one or two mouse clicks required to place the response onto the desk of the Examiner.
Four months. Not acceptable. Continue reading “Unacceptable USPTO delays in forwarding responses to Examiners”