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Learning to guess outcomes of appeals of 2d refusals

the TTABlog - keeping tabs on the TTABThanks to John L. Welch’s hundreds of blog articles about 2d refusals, I have gotten to the point where sometimes I can guess correctly the outcome of an ex parte appeal of a 2d refusal.  The alert reader might ask:

    • What is a “2d refusal”?
    • Why would it be interesting to try to guess “the outcome of an ex parte appeal of a 2d refusal”?
    • How might it be that hundreds of blog articles by John L. Welch might lead to a situation in which sometimes I can guess the outcome of such an appeal?
    • And, what can be said of John L. Welch’s extraordinary contributions to the trademark community through his blog?  Continue reading “Learning to guess outcomes of appeals of 2d refusals”
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“ante-penultimate”

Thanks to Brian E. Hanlon, Assistant Commissioner for Patents at the USPTO, I learned a new word today:

antepenultimate.

Assistant Commissioner Hanlon recently published a memo dated October 24, 2025 entitled Advance notice of change to the MPEP with respect to false assertions or certifications of entity status.   It contains these words:

The ante-penultimate and penultimate paragraphs in MPEP § 410 are revised to read …

Of course we all already knew what “penultimate” means, namely “second from the end”.  Thanks to Mr. Hanlon, today I learned of the existence of “antepenultimate” which means “third from the end”.  (The word is not actually hyphenated.)

It turns out that there are more words like this:

      • “preantepenultimate” means “fourth from the end” and
      • “propreantepenultimate” means “fifth from the end”.
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Why all trademark practitioners need to know about BIMI

BIMI logoDo you or your trademark client ever find that your outbound email to somebody ends up in their spam folder?  Do you or your trademark client ever find that your outbound email to a recipient gets wrongly bounced as “suspected spam” or gets silently discarded by the recipient’s email service provider?

There’s a chance that BIMI, which draws upon a registered trademark of the sender of an email message, might help a little with these problems.  What is BIMI?  What must an email sender do to get BIMI to work?

Continue reading “Why all trademark practitioners need to know about BIMI”

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Detecting and locating lightning strikes

how far away the lightning strike is
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Loyal readers of this blog will recall (blog article) that I have constructed and have placed into service a station that detects a lightning strike and reports it to a crowd-sourced system that uses the report to determine where the lightning strike happened.  Hundreds or thousands of times per day, my station detects a lightning strike and reports it to the crowd-sourced system.

The alert reader will surely wonder “how far away are these lightning strikes?”  Today’s blog article answers this question, and it draws upon the screen shot that you see above.  Continue reading “Detecting and locating lightning strikes”

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27 hours from now – USPTO discusses Section 101

27 hours from now, the USPTO will present a one-hour webinar discussing rejections under Section 101.  For more information, or to register for the webinar, click here.

Yes, we get 27 hours of advance notice for this event.

I do plan to attend.

I imagine that the presenters will be very, very dry, carefully avoiding doing or saying anything that could possibly extend beyond reading aloud, nearly word for word, from their presentation slides.

And I imagine the presentation slides will have been carefully crafted to do absolutely nothing beyond literal quotations from the source documents.

The chief source documents, as you know, are:

I have cited these two documents in quite a few responses to Office Actions in recent weeks, and in response, the Examiners have gone out of their way to ignore these two citations and to maintain their 101 rejections.

I predict that not one word will be uttered that extends beyond what one could already have learned simply by reading the source documents.  Nonetheless the fact that the event is taking place will surely count as a sort of signal to the patent community that USPTO leadership wants to influence the course of examination under Section 101.

One hopes that a similar webinar is being presented to the Examining Corps.

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Selecting a TSA luggage lock

TSA lock
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Is it a good idea to use a TSA luggage lock?  Are they secure?  Should you get a suitcase with a TSA lock built in, or should you use a separate TSA lock?  What can you do to reduce the risk that a bad person could open the lock?  What is the meaning of the red diamond logo? What features should I look for in such a lock?

In this blog article I offer answers to these questions. Continue reading “Selecting a TSA luggage lock”

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Why is this door lever vertical?

door handle in Detroit Marriott hotel
click to enlarge

Yesterday I was among the presenters for a day-long class about the Patent Cooperation Treaty at the Detroit patent office.  The audience was alert and attentive and had lots of good questions.  It was a delightful day.

The hotel room that the organizers of the class booked for me had a door lever that puzzled me.  As you can see in the photo at right, the door lever was vertical.  I tried to figure out why it was vertical.  Was my particular hotel room the only one like this?  Was it simply a sloppy mistake by a worker when the hotel was built?  If so, why did the mistake not get corrected during the succeeding decades?  Or was it intentional that it is vertical?  Can you figure it out?  Continue reading “Why is this door lever vertical?”