Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
Hopefully everybody who is in Barcelona for the INTA meeting already has their ribbons to attend the two must-attend receptions:
The weather in Barcelona is delightful just now. MTB XIII will be at Xup Xup which is a beachfront venue. The e-Trademarks reception will be at Opera Samfina which is in the middle of La Rambla.
See you there!
If you only attend two events in Barcelona during the INTA meeting, these are the two events to attend … Continue reading “If you only attend two events in Barcelona …”
The landscape for VPN routers has changed over the years. As of a few years ago, sophisticated VPN routers with IPSEC were ethernet-only. Continue reading “A good VPN router with dual-band wifi and good tech support”
(Updated to include screen shot from USPTO’s dashboard, thanks to Ken Boone.)
The post-registration branch at the USPTO — the group of people whose job it is to look at a six-year renewal or a ten-year renewal — sure is slow sometimes.
We have one where we filed our renewal on March 22, 2017. The post-reg people accepted it on May 9, 2017 (which is what prompted today’s blog post). Actually that was only six or seven weeks which was faster than many cases. We had one recently that took almost five months to get looked at. We filed the renewal on October 18, 2016 and it did not get looked at until April 4, 2017.
The problem of course is that if post-reg takes five months to look at a renewal, and if post-reg finds some real or imagined flaw in the renewal papers, then there is precious little time to try to straighten things out. In this case with the delay of almost five months, the post-reg person bounced the renewal because of a flaw that was merely imagined, not real. We argued with the post-reg person, but we had our backs against the wall because the renewal window was going to expire in just a few days. Fortunately the post-reg person withdrew the bounce. But still this forced the client to endure uncertainty for almost five months, for no good reason.
It sure will be good when the USPTO gets the post-reg branch back to normal.
Okay folks here is a chance to win a free digital multimeter.
What prompts this is that I keep hearing a particular music-on-hold (MOH) song on lots of different tech support and customer service systems. So I figure this song is probably one of the standard royalty-free MOH songs that comes with the Asterisk phone system or something. You can hear the song here.
To win the prize, post a comment with a link to the web page where this particular MOH song can be downloaded.
The Israel Patent Office presently charges a search fee of $911 for US filers. On July 1, 2017 this fee will increase to $963.
At the present time, very few US PCT filers pick ISA/IL. So this fee increase will not affect very many US PCT filers.
Today the search fee paid by a US filer for the Russian patent office as International Searching Authority increases from $449 to $482. (I first reported this here on March 17, 2017.)
Filers who use EFS-Web to file in RO/US, or who use PCT-SAFE or ePCT to file in RO/IB, will not need to worry about getting this right. Each of those e-filing systems has already been updated today to reflect the new fee.
Those who, like me, often record assignments at the USPTO are accustomed to the steps that are required to e-file in EPAS (electronic patent assignment system) and ETAS (electronic trademark assignment system). The steps include identifying the assignor and the assignee, and then comes the step of entering the properties for which the assignment is being recorded. I am delighted to be able to report that USPTO has made this very user friendly for an assignment that applies to many properties. Continue reading “USPTO provides a nice user feature in EPAS and ETAS”
I have blogged here (in 2015) and here (in 2014) about the need for USPTO to implement SSL (secure sockets layer or “https://”) on all of its external-facing web sites. I have reminded the USPTO that there is an executive order from the White House directing all US government agencies to do this. USPTO was very slow to comply, but has made some progress. One of the last web sites that USPTO managed to migrate to SSL was the Public PAIR web site.
Recently came the disappointing news that USPTO made plans to roll back the functionality of the Public PAIR web site. In a posting on April 3, 2017, USPTO said:
The USPTO will be performing maintenance on the Public Patent
Application Information Retrieval (Public Pair) beginning at 12:01
a.m., Friday, April 21 and ending at 2 a.m., Friday, April 21 ET.
During the maintenance period, Public PAIR will be unavailable.
Immediately after the maintenance, users will only be able to access
Public PAIR through URLs beginning with HTTP, such as
https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair. Past URLs using HTTPS to
access Public Pair, such as
https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair, will no longer work.
Now comes an announcement on April 24, 2017:
HTTPS access to Public PAIR
The USPTO’s public facing legacy systems, such as Public PAIR, were not designed to support HTTPS protocol. The agency has worked hard to enhance these legacy systems to support HTTPS. Following the agency’s April 11, 2017 deployment of HTTPS to Public PAIR, some public users reported errors accessing Public PAIR. A decision was made to back-out the new HTTPS capability while the agency investigated a resolution to the issue. We expect to implement a fix and restoration of the HTTPS protocol in the next few weeks. The USPTO is sorry for any inconvenience.
There’s just no excuse for this. People who administer web sites are well aware that there are off-the-shelf solutions for adding SSL functionality to any legacy web site. There are modestly priced commercial boxes (simple boxes that you connect between the web server and the Internet) to do this. For those who cannot afford a modestly priced commercial solution, there are off-the-shelf open-source solutions that run on a simple inexpensive Linux box. These solutions do not require any modification to the legacy system, and they do not slow down the user access data rates.
Let’s hope USPTO does a Google search or two and learns how to do this.
Design Day 2017 is taking place right now at the USPTO in Alexandria, Virginia. The room is packed, with people sitting around the edge of the room because all of the tables are occupied. David Gerk is speaking right now.