Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
From time to time in the EFS-Web listserv, list members have commented on the need for a registered practitioner to keep the Office of Enrollment and Discipline informed of the practitioners’s mailing address changes. I now have first-hand knowledge of the enormous fraction of registered practitioners who do indeed fail to keep the OED up to date. Continue reading “Failing to tell the OED your new address”
There was a development in the industrial design community last month that almost went unnoticed. On July 20, 2018, the Korean Intellectual Property Office became a Depositing Office in the DAS system for designs.
This is unfortunately no help for US design filers who wish to claim priority from a Korean priority application, because as of right now, the USPTO and the KIPO are still connected in PDX. And PDX trumps DAS. Hopefully Real Soon Now the USPTO will pull the plug on the PDX connection to KIPO, and then US design filers will be able to use DAS to get electronic certified copies of Korean design applications.
The ID5 is the big five Offices for protection of industrial designs. The Offices are the USPTO, the EUIPO (formerly known as OHIM), JPO (the Japanese patent office), KIPO (the Korean intellectual property office) and SIPO (the Chinese patent office).
Conspicuous by its absence from DAS is EUIPO. I keep hearing that EUIPO will join DAS Real Soon Now. I do hope that EUIPO will follow through with this.
USPTO is not, at the present time, a Depositing Office in DAS for design applications. USPTO has promised that Real Soon Now it will become a Depositing Office for designs. I do hope that USPTO will follow through with this.
JPO is not, at the present time, a Depositing Office in DAS for design applications. I also hope that JPO will follow through soon with this.
September 1, 2018 is a big day. It is the day that everything changes for US utility patent applicants who are claiming priority from Chinese priority applications. Continue reading “September 1 and US utility patent applications that claim priority from Chinese patent applications”
There’s a big change that will happen four days from now for the US design applicant who claims priority from a Chinese design application.
Just now I tested the SSL security ratings for some of the law firms that obtain large numbers of US design patents for their clients (blog article here). This prompted me to look at some patent office web sites. Here are the results: Continue reading “SSL security ratings for some patent office web sites”
(Update August 28, 2018: I am delighted to report that the firm mentioned below, that had had a “C” rating for their web site security, has today corrected the problem and now has an “A” rating.)
There are many ways that a web site could be insecure. One of the ways is to implement SSL (“https://”) poorly. It turns out to be quite easy to find out whether your SSL implementation is strong or weak. You simply plug your web address into the SSL tester provided by Qualys. Maybe your web site will get an A+ rating! Here are how some well-known intellectual property law firm web sites performed in this SSL test. Continue reading “How good is your web site security?”
Readers of my blog will recall that I have mentioned the importance of protecting your web site with SSL (meaning that the web site supports “https://”). The SSL protects the visitors to your web site, as well as boosting your Google search ranking. Now comes yet another smart thing that you should do to protect your web site — setting up DNS Certification Authority Authorization (CAA). CAA is a thing that does not cost you any money to do, and you only need to do it once. CAA greatly reduces the risk that a bad person could compromise the SSL protection on your web site.
Continue reading “A smart way to protect your web site — CAAs”
There’s good news as reported by the members of the PAIR and EFS-Web listservs. EFS-Web and Private PAIR seem to be working again.
Yesterday at 4PM Eastern, USPTO posted a plan:
While systems have been coming back online throughout the day, we intend to take them out of service beginning at 10:00 p.m. ET tonight [yesterday evening August 21]. Our onsite experts will be working throughout the night to further optimize system performance. We anticipate that the systems will be back online tomorrow morning [today August 22].
I told USPTO that it would have been more user-friendly for USPTO to schedule this takedown for 12:01 AM ET. But the takedown proceeded yesterday evening as described in the posted plan. The systems are still down now, at 6:42 AM ET.