(Update: I no longer recommend Whatsapp. I now recommend Signal. See blog article.)
The messaging app that you should be using is Whatsapp. Drop the other messaging apps that you have been using, and switch to Whatsapp. Urge your messaging pals to migrate to Whatsapp. Why? Because it uses end-to-end encryption and Perfect Forward Secrecy. I will explain why this is so important.
A couple of weeks ago I had the honor of teaching a class at the annual meeting of the Tennessee Intellectual Property Law Association. It was a delightful time. The Association members made me feel welcome and the class went well. (I spoke about best practices for use of the Patent Cooperation Treaty.) But that’s not the point of today’s post. The point of today’s post is to comment on the background music in the Nashville airport. Continue reading
Today I gave a presentation on Restoration of Priority. This was at the AIPLA meeting in Minneapolis. Here was the audience. I guess about 150 people. Also on the dais were Robert Sachs, talking about Section 101 and Alice, and Suzannah Sundby, talking about Section 101 in the biotech/pharma world. You can download my slides here.
Yesterday the USPTO published a graph showing progress in disposing of what had been a very discouraging backlog of unattended-to Patent Prosecution Highway
requests. Here is the graph:
From a glance at this graph, one might have the impression that the problem at the USPTO had started in October of 2015. In fact the problem dated from at least as early as November 2014, when I blogged about ever-increasing delays at the USPTO in granting PPH requests. In April of 2015 I had faxed a letter to Director Lee about this growing backlog.
USPTO’s graph indicates a backlog of unattended-to PPH requests of about 3200 cases in October 2015, reaching a peak of about 4000 in February 2016, and a notable drop to around 2400 as of a few weeks ago. (I note that our firm, all by itself, was responsible for something like 2% of all of these PPH cases.)
The interesting question is how this effort at the USPTO is working out nowadays for particular applicants. We try to track these things pretty closely at our firm, and here is what we see. Continue reading
Will you be in Orlando, Florida at the time of the 2016 meeting of INTA (the International T
rademark Association)? Are you a member of the E-Trademarks Listserv? Are you with a trademark or patent firm located outside of the US? Or are you with a corporation? If so, we hope you will join the people of Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC at our reception for the E-Trademarks Listserv. Our reception will take place at B B King’s Blues Club from 5PM to 8PM on Tuesday, May 24.
To learn more abut the reception, and to RSVP, please click here.
A few months ago, trademark practitioners were comparing experiences with backlogs at “post-reg”. By this we mean the branch of the USPTO that handles papers filed after a trademark has registered. (The forum in which they discussed these backlogs is the E-trademarks listserv.) As of a few months ago, they were seeing backlogs in the range of 2-3 months. But recently things seem to have improved drastically. Continue reading