Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
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”
Here is a sanctions order in a patent litigation case in federal district court in Kansas. Several lawyers permitted their names to appear in a signature block of a brief. The brief contained a citation to a non-existent case. The brief cited multiple cases for saying things that they did not say. How did the judge choose the magnitude of sanction to be imposed on each of the lawyers? Continue reading “Yet another round of sanctions for using AI-hallucinated case citations”
Hello readers. It is now 2026 and this means it is time to get in your numbers for the 2025 toteboards:
The goal is to recognize and rank law firms in the US based upon the numbers of US design patents, US utility patents, US plant patents, and US trademark registrations each firm obtained for clients in 2025.
The questionnaires will close on Friday, February 13, 2026.
Here is a page suggesting how you might obtain these numbers.
Every year after I post the results of the toteboards, I get sad emails from firms that want me to accept their numbers late. This would, of course, typically result in kicking other firms down in the rankings — other firms that got their numbers in on time. Please help to reduce the number of such sad emails that I will receive this year. Maybe you are a person at your firm who is responsible for getting these numbers in. If so, please get your numbers in! Otherwise, please forward this blog posting to somebody at your firm to make sure that somebody at your firm gets the numbers in for your firm.
You can see the previous toteboards here, going back to the earliest toteboard in 2012.
In recent days, our email server for our listservs may have removed your email address from membership in one or another of the listservs. Assuming that you did not want this, what should you do? Continue reading “What to do if your email service provider has been bouncing our listserv postings”
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””