Carl Oppedahl's blog
Last night was Meet the Bloggers XI. Yes, the eleventh annual reception. Henry’s Pub, the same restaurant in San Diego where the first and original Meet the Bloggers took place ten years ago, was closed to the public for the night for this special event. 
In this exterior shot of the restaurant you can see maybe half of the people who attended this reception.
In this shot you can see Erik Pelton giving out some of the door prizes.
Send an email today to a trademark practitioner located anywhere in the world, and likely as not you will receive an automatic reply like this:
Hello. I am out of the office until May 8 with limited access to email. If this matter is urgent please contact my assistant so-and-so …
The reason, of course, is that the email recipient is in San Diego right now. As am I. If you are in San Diego and want to see me this week, the best way to do it is to drop by one of these two receptions.
US trademark practitioners are just now starting to get asked by foreign clients to do a ki
nd of filing that never existed before about September of 2014. The filing is a ten-year Statement of Use for a US Madrid registration. This blog article tries to explain such filings and how they are similar to and different from other US trademark maintenance and renewal filings. If you already understand everything about the figure at right, you can skip reading this blog article!
Continue reading “How Madrid ten-year trademark renewals work”
There’s a curious temporary display in the atrium at the USPTO. Called “Walk through time”, it is a winding
path with large printed labels on the floor, portraying various events in the history of the USPTO. It starts with the founding of the patent office and proceeds through some sixty or so events to the present. 
My personal favorites are the 1887 event (the US joins the Paris Convention) and the 1970 event (the US joins the Patent Cooperation Treaty).
It’s fascinating to see the USPTO correcting its mistake in a recent acknowledgment of an incontestability claim in a trademark registration.
(See a followup article.)
Law Professor Rebecca Tushnet (Georgetown Law School) has a fascinating blog called Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log with a tagline of “False advertising and more”. If you haven’t subscribed to her blog, you should. One of her blog posts today is No dog in this fight: PTO makes a cancelled mark incontestable. The story told by this posting is by turns amusing, puzzling, and astonishing as one reads about the manner in which the USPTO handled the underlying trademark application and registration.
Will you be in San Diego at the time of the INTA annual meeting? If so, there are two receptions that you won’t want to miss.
Continue reading “The two receptions that you need to attend in San Diego in May”
Yes it’s another snow day at the Patent Office.
The weather reports for the Washington area call for “six to ten inches of snow” between now and noon on Tuesday. So the USPTO will be formally closed on Tuesday, February 17. This means that if you needed to file something on the 17th to satisfy some USPTO due date, it will be timely if filed on Wednesday the 18th.
Continue reading “USPTO will be closed on Tuesday, February 17”
Just a reminder that the USPTO will be closed on Monday, February 16. This is Washington’s Birthday* which is a federal holiday.
Anything that you might need to do by February 16 to satisfy some USPTO due date may be postponed until Tuesday, February 17 and will still be timely.