I’ll be speaking at the 2015 annual meeting of the National Association of Patent Practitioners. The meeting is July 11-14 in Denver.
Speaking at AIPLA’s Patent Prosecution Boot Camp
I’ll be speaking this April at the AIPLA Patent Prosecution Boot Camp. This two-day seminar is tailored to new practitioners (those having less than two years of experience), or others who want to learn the basics of patent application preparation and prosecution. This seminar includes instructional sessions and hands-on claim drafting workshops.
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How to minimize service disruption with a notebook computer
(See followup article here.)
These days my notebook computer is absolutely mission critical for me. If my notebook computer were to fail and if it were to take some days to get it repaired, the loss of use of the computer for those days would be a really big problem. Fortunately, a few years ago I figured out how to reduce any service disruption due to a computer failure to just about zero.
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What “MP3” means
I checked into a hotel recently where the clock radio in the guest room had a conventional 3½-millimeter plug (see photo) which could be plugged into the guest’s smart phone or music player. This would permit playing music through the speaker of the clock radio. What I found amusing is what the manufacturer chose to write on the clock to let the user know about this feature — “MP3”. This is silly.
Practitioner’s Guide to the PCT now available faster, cheaper
The Practitioner’s Guide to the Patent Cooperation Treaty is published by the AB
A. For the longest time you could only get it directly from the ABA and it cost a lot of money and took forever to arrive. Now you can get it faster and cheaper.
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This weekend and your filings at WIPO
This weekend is when Americans (well, most Americans) change their clocks for Daylight Saving Time. This makes a big difference if you are going to e-file something at WIPO or fax-file something at WIPO.
USPTO closed today (Thursday)
Yes it’s another snow day at the Patent Office.
Design Day 2015
Registration is now open for the Ninth Annual USPTO Design Day. This important event will take place April 14, 2015.
Adopting a digital wallet redux
In a previous blog post I urged you to adopt a digital wallet. Players in the digital wallet arena are falling by the wayside, but this leave unchanged the important reason why you should adopt a digital w
allet, namely that bad guys won’t be able to skim your credit card number as they would with your use of a swiped mag-stripe card. Most strikingly the digital wallet that I adopted, Softcard, has bitten the dust. Appropriately for this blog, nobody actually purchased the ill-fated Softcard. Instead someone merely purchased its intellectual property.
What caption to use when responding to a patent Office Action?
Most of us, when we were learning how to prepare a response to a patent Office Action in the USPTO, were taught to load up the caption with every conceivable piece of information. When I was first in practice I was taught to provide not only the application number but also the art unit, the Examiner’s name, the filing date, and the title of the invention. Some years later the USPTO introduced the “confirmation number” and this, too, went into the caption. Now I skip all of this and I use the application number and nothing else in the caption. Why?
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