Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
An article just now in The Guardian says:
In a memo seen by the Guardian, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) announced a “reduction in force” (RIF) program of layoffs at the agency on Wednesday, the first reported agency to do so.
“Approximately one percent of the USPTO workforce will be affected by this RIF,” wrote Valencia Martin Wallace, acting commissioner for the USPTO, wrote to employees at the agency. The USPTO did not respond to a request for comment
The USPTO has apparently discontinued recognizing the Madrid Protocol status of US trademark registrations. Nobody outside the USPTO knows why. Continue reading “USPTO discontinues recognizing Madrid Protocol status”
(Update: every USPTO system relating to assignments is now broken on October 16, 2025, see blog article.)
On August 27, 2025, the USPTO said (quoted at right) that Saturday, September 27, 2025 was the day that the USPTO would shut down the two familiar assignment search systems, forcing users over to a new assignment search function in Assignment Center.
It appears the USPTO has blinked and will postpone this shutdown for about three weeks, until Monday, October 20, 2025. Continue reading “USPTO blinks on shutdown of familiar assignment searches”
On August 4, 2025, the USPTO’s Deputy Commissioner for Patents (Charles Kim) published a document entitled Reminders on evaluating subject matter eligibility of claims under 35 U.S.C. 101 which you may see here (archived here). I think the document may be of some help for applicants facing 101 rejections. Continue reading “A “reminders” document that might help with 101 problems”
(A commenter pointed out a mistake in this article — the applicant apparently did not appeal to the ARP. What apparently really happened is that the ARP, sua sponte, chose to take action. I fixed it. Thanks to the commenter.)
Today the USPTO published a decision called Ex parte Desjardins et alia, 2024-000567 (Appeals Review Panel, September 26, 2025). a copy of which may be seen here. It looks like this decision may be of some help to applicants facing 101 rejections. Continue reading “A decision that might help with 101 problems”
It is now six weeks ago that I followed instructions from the EBC and used fax to send in a Form 2248 in two of my PCT cases. (See blog article.) Yes, six weeks have now passed during which EBC continues to fail to act upon either of the Forms 2248 that I sent to them.
Folks, there are still seats available for my 2½-day PCT seminar that starts on September 30, 2025.
Please register for this seminar. For more information, or to register click here.
I just got done paying the fee for a second RCE in one of my clients’ cases. Ouch! $2860 for a non-small entity.
I then went to the trouble to add up the filing fee, search fee, and exam fee that would have been paid in an ordinary continuation. Looks like that adds up to $2000.
I note that the number 2000 is smaller than the number 2860.
Which got me thinking about the question of the subject line. What is smarter to use — RCE or continuation? Continue reading “What is better — an RCE or a continuation?”
Hello loyal readers. Hopefully many of you have logged in to attend this PCT seminar that is taking place right now at the San Jose patent office.
I am delighted to report that we have some thirty-two in-person attendees as well as some eighty-two virtual attendees.
It will be recalled that recently I obtained a Blitzortung lightning detection station and placed it into service. My station is number 3205 and it is one of about 1170 active stations around the world.
No single station ever figures out the location of a lightning strike by itself; whenever the Blitzortung server figures out the location of a lightning strike, it is by drawing upon signal reports from dozens of stations like mine.
Here you can see a lightning strike that happened a few minutes ago, at about 8:35 PM, just southwest of Albuquerque, NM. On this map, lines radiate outward from the strike location to the locations of the stations that participated in the location process. On this map, I have noted the location of my station in the mountains of Colorado.
It is interesting to see that some of the stations that helped to detect this strike in New Mexico were as far as 3000 kilometers (1800 miles) away. (The electromagnetic pulse created by a lightning strike will routinely propagate many thousands of kilometers.)
My station detects an average of about one lightning strike per second, thus sending tens of thousands of signal reports per day to the server. On an average day, the reports provided by my station get used by the server to locate a couple of thousand lightning strikes. Another way to say this is that on average, about 8% of the reports provided by my station get used by the server to locate a particular lightning strike.