Wednesday, January 1, 2020 will be a federal holiday in the District of Columbia. This means the USPTO will be closed. This means that any action that would be due at the USPTO on January 1 will be timely if it is done by Thursday, January 2, 2020.
Monthly Archives: December 2019
Today is the day for Viet Nam and the Hague Agreement
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It will be recalled that I blogged recently that Viet Nam deposited its instrument of accession to the Hague Agreement on September 30, 2019. Thus today is the day. The Hague Agreement enters into force for Viet Nam today.
Today Viet Nam achieves the trifecta, with membership in the Patent Cooperation Treaty, the Madrid Protocol, and now the Hague Agreement.
The two-letter code for Viet Nam is “VN”.
Trademark Office has not backed down yet on post office boxes
Back on September 24th (blog article) a very high-up person in the Office of the Commissioner for Trademarks had telephoned me, promising me that Real Soon Now the Trademark Office would issue yet another Exam Guideline, doing the right thing about post office boxes. Unfortunately that has not happened. Trademark practitioners are starting to receive super-intrusive Office Actions demanding things like revealing the personal home addresses of clients. What can be done about all of this? Continue reading
“Fewer”, not “less”
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There’s a bit of bad grammar in Patentcenter. If you are using Patentcenter to look at a patent application, the number of inventors might exceed four. In that case you might click “show all inventors” to see all of the inventors. Then you would see a Patentcenter screen listing all of the inventors, an example of which appears at right.
You might then want to return to the normal screen that does not show all of the inventors. For this, the designers of Patentcenter chose the words “Show less inventors” which is wrong. A similar mistake is often made in stores where an overhead sign might say that the express checkout lane is for those with “ten or less items”. The correct wording would be “ten or fewer items”. You can see explanations of this here and here.
The correct way to say this in Patentcenter would, of course, be “Show fewer inventors”.
It will be interesting to see how long it takes the folks at USPTO to correct this mistake.
Today is the day for Malaysia and the Madrid Protocol
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Today is the day. As of today, a trademark owner in Malaysia can file a Madrid Protocol application to pursue protection in one or more Offices outside of Malaysia. Starting today, a trademark owner outside of Malaysia can file a Subsequent Designation to Malaysia (or can file a new Madrid Protocol application designating Malaysia).
The two-letter code for Malaysia is “MY”.
What these three things have in common?
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Here are images showing three things, one of which is the two-factor authentication box on the USPTO web site. That box used to say “This is a computer that I trust and use regularly” (blog article, October 8, 2019) but recently the USPTO changed the wording of this box. Now it says “Remember this browser and do not ask again for 24 hours.” Although USPTO changed the wording in the box, I do not think USPTO changed anything about the actual function of the box. This prompts me to invite the reader to post a comment below if you can think of something that is similar about these three things.
Why do we need so many specimens of use nowadays?
Nowadays when the time comes to do a six-year or ten-year renewal of a US trademark registration, I find that I often need to spend a lot of extra professional time explaining to the client why I feel we need to have lots of extra specimens of use. And I find I often need to spend a lot of extra professional time explaining to the client why I feel we need to work harder than ever before on canceling goods and services from the registration as part of the renewal process. I’ll explain why this is. Continue reading
December 24 and 25 are holidays at the USPTO
It was already known (blog post) that Wednesday, December 25, 2019 will be a federal holiday in the District of Columbia. Today’s news is that in addition, by order of the President, the federal government will be closed on Tuesday, December 24. This means the USPTO will be closed not only on December 25 but also on December 24. This means that any action that would be due at the USPTO on December 24 or 25 will be timely if it is done by Thursday, December 26, 2019.
New book: PCT Forms and PCT Docketing
I’m working on a new book. It’s entitled Oppedahl on PCT Forms and PCT Docketing. Right now it is in what I might term beta testing. The book is version 0.8. I am providing copies of the book to some folks free of charge in the hopes that they will take a look at the book and maybe make suggestions or corrections. Then I will finalize the book and release it for general sale. Continue reading
December 25 is a holiday at the USPTO
Wednesday, December 25, 2019 will be a federal holiday in the District of Columbia. This means the USPTO will be closed. This means that any action that would be due at the USPTO on December 25 will be timely if it is done by Thursday, December 26, 2019.