Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
Here is a quotation from an email that one of my colleagues sent to a client today:
We received a telephone call from the Examiner in the subject application.
The Examiner confirmed that the mention of a rejection under 35 U.S.C. 101 in the recent office action was a typographical error.
Wow, it would be so nice to receive more such phone calls! I do think that such telephone calls would promote science and the useful arts.
A member of the Madrid Protocol listserv asked:
I would like to file an e-subsequent designation for India. The country of origin is the EU and the owner is in an EU-member country. A [Madrid Protocol] application was filed in 2011 designating countries other than India. On the e-Subsequent Designation application page, a number of countries are listed from which to choose to designate protection. India is NOT listed as one of those countries. Am I missing something? Does anyone know why India does not appear in the list of countries to designate subsequent protection to?
I was fascinated to learn why it is that India is a member of the Madrid Protocol and yet an owner of an International Trademark Registration might not be able to carry out a subsequent designation to India. The explanation also offers a reminder how important it is to use an e-validated filing tool from WIPO rather than filing on paper. Continue reading “Why you can’t always count on a subsequent designation being available?”
We are all familiar with systems that force the user to select a password using a complexity rule. You know, the rules that say that the password is required to contain an upper case letter and a lower case letter and a numerical digit and at least one character that requires at least two hands to type on a keyboard.
And we are all familiar with systems that force the user to change his or her password frequently — every few months for example.
It turns out that these rules are outdated and should be scrapped.
Continue reading “Password complexity rules are out of date”
The intellectual property community benefits each time another Office joins the Digital Access Service (DAS).
The good news is that on November 1, 2017, the Eurasian Patent Office (EAPO) will join DAS.
EAPO will participate with DAS in both directions:
The participation will include color documents as well as gray scale and black and white documents.
This is very good news.
Perhaps the biggest patent office (in terms of volume of patent filings) that has not yet joined DAS is the European Patent Office. Here is a set of slides which EPO presented in May of 2015. At slide 8, the EPO said:
It will surely be a welcome development when EPO joins DAS.
Another welcome development will be when EUIPO joins DAS, which will facilitate exchange of priority documents for the purpose of industrial design applications.
(See followup article on EPO’s plans to join DAS.)
In the EFS-Web listserv, a practitioner posts this question:
We have decided to go paperless for the future and to destroy all of our archived paper files for the period since every application appears on the PTO PAIR Image File Wrapper. Does anyone know what date the PTO began imaging every application filed? I know for a while they were going back and imaging some files, but not all. I want to know after what date we can be confident that the image file wrapper is in PAIR.
In this blog post I will try to answer the “what date” question and I will offer a thought or two about how a practitioner might decide which files can be destroyed.
Continue reading “How to decide when to destroy an old patent file?”
It will be recalled that on September 1, 2017 the search fee paid by US filers of PCT applications for the EPO searching authority increased from $1992 to $2099. Now it has been announced that on December 1, 2017 this fee will increase again, this time to $2238. Continue reading “Search fee for ISA/EP to increase on December 1”
If you want to be trendy, modern, and up-to-date, you can now e-file “docx” files at the USPTO. If you do this, not only will you be trendy, modern, and up-to-date, but you will also likely encounter fewer instances in the future in which you need to request a Certificate of Correction or a corrected publication. Read on to learn how to be trendy, modern, and up-to-date. Continue reading “E-filing docx files at the USPTO”
The majority of US trademark registrations lack “incontestable” status, because the owner of the registration has not filed “Section 15” papers at the USPTO. (I have blogged here about what “incontestable” status means and why a trademark owner might want to gain “incontestable” status.) In this article I will talk about ways to gain “incontestable” status economically.
If, like me, you often fly United Airlines to and from Washington, DC, then you have, like me, spent time in the C and D concourse of Dulles Airport. And you have some sense how decrepit and discouraging that concourse is. The main terminal was designed in 1958 by famed Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen, and it is highly regarded for its graceful beauty, suggestive of flight. But passengers spend little time in the main terminal. For United passengers, most time is spent in the C-D concourse. Continue reading “Dulles’s C and D concourse”
I imagine some readers of this blog use an authentication app as part of a two-factor authentication process for various services. For a long time I have been using Google Authenticator (right) with some systems. I’d like to ask readers to please post a comment below if you use an authentication app, mentioning some of the services that you use it with. Continue reading “Seeking comments on authenticator apps”
