I have given quite a bit of thought to ways that a patent applicant or practitioner might be able to avoid the profound malpractice risk of filing in Microsoft Word (DOCX) format when filing a patent application. As of right now I have thought of two ways. Maybe there are more ways. Continue reading “Ways to avoid having to pay USPTO’s $400 non-DOCX penalty”
USPTO’s $400 non-DOCX penalty and car rental collision damage waivers
Patent applicants and practitioners continue to resent the USPTO’s $400 penalty that it plans to impose upon any patent applicant that has the temerity to try to establish a PDF file as the “controlling” document for the patent application being filed. The penalty was going to start a few days ago, on January 1, 2023. The USPTO blinked and has postponed the penalty to a starting date of April 3, 2023. As of right now, that is when this penalty will begin.
The other day I realized that there is a pretty strong analogy to make here between this $400 penalty and another bane of daily life — car rental companies gouging renters with the “collision damage waiver”. Continue reading “USPTO’s $400 non-DOCX penalty and car rental collision damage waivers”
Director Vidal could have said “thank you”
On October 11, 2022, through the work of Krista Jacobsen, the following two letters were sent to USPTO Director Kathi Vidal:
-
- A first letter, signed by twenty-seven patent practitioners, was about erroneous information in official Filing Receipts regarding publication dates. You can see the signed letter here.
- A second letter, signed by twenty-five patent practitioners, was about missing information in official Filing Receipts regarding whether or not a Foreign Filing License has been granted. You can see the signed letter here.
Today, January 6, 2023, the USPTO published a document bearing Director Vidal’s signature and dated January 3, 2023. It seems the USPTO plans to publish the document in the January 24, 2023 Official Gazette. You can see the document here and it is archived here. Director Vidal’s Notice admits that in March of 2022, the USPTO broke something about how it generates filing receipts, so that there were many FFL-related defects in many filing receipts thereafter, and filing receipts in design patent applications and provisional applications got mailed that wrongly showed a projected publication date. (The USPTO does not publish design patent applications or provisional patent applications.) The notice admits that the USPTO did not fix what was broken until October 18, 2022. After that, the USPTO mailed out corrected filing receipts to replace the filing receipts that failed to say that an FFL had already been granted.
For several reasons, including knowledge of internal communications at the USPTO after Krista sent the two letters, I believe that it was specifically Krista’s two letters that made the USPTO aware of the problems, and I believe that her two letters were the direct cause of the USPTO fixing its broken system.
What I find extremely disappointing is that Director Vidal’s notice fails to say “thank you”. It fails to acknowledge the communications that brought this problem to her attention.
In Director Vidal’s notice, the USPTO pretends that it was the USPTO that “discovered” these problems.
It would not have cost a penny for Director Vidal to add a sentence to her notice, saying something like “The USPTO thanks a group of patent practioners whose letters to the USPTO prompted the corrective action by the USPTO.”
I think the right thing now would be for Director Vidal to prepare and mail a letter of thanks to Krista, and through her, to the more than two dozen signers of the two letters.
Setting up a VLAN for your IOT devices
Each time I install another internet-of-things (“IOT”) device in my home, it is always the same: the device requires that I tell it the wifi password for the Internet connection in my home. The app that needs to be installed on my smart phone to get the IOT device working also asks lots of intrusive things, and demands to be given access to my “location”. This leads to a situation where the IOT device could be a security risk for trusted devices on my local area network. What can be done to reduce or eliminate the security risks presented by the dozens of IOT devices in my home? Part of the answer is to set up a VLAN (virtual local area network). Then the IOT devices are denied any opportunity to have any access to my trusted devices. I will describe how this is done.
Three law review articles about internet domain name disputes
Here are three law review articles that I published about internet domain name disputes:
-
- Carl Oppedahl, Recent Trademark Cases Examine Reverse Domain Name Hijacking, 21 Hastings Comm. & Ent. L. J. 535 (1998).
- Carl Oppedahl, Remedies in Domain Name Lawsuits: How is a Domain Name Like a Cow, 15 J. Marshall J. Computer & Info. L. 437 (1997).
- Carl Oppedahl, Analysis and Suggestions Regarding NSI Domain Name Trademark Dispute Policy, 77 Fordham Intell. Prop. Media & Ent. L. J. 73 (1996)
A law review article about patent marking of systems
Here is an article that I published in the Santa Clara Computer & High-Tech Law Journal twenty-seven years ago about how to do patent marking of systems.
Carl Oppedahl, Patent Marking of Systems, 11 Santa Clara Computer & High Tech. L. J. 205 (1995)
A law review article about wind energy
Forty-one years ago, I co-authored a law review article in the Harvard Environmental Law Review promoting the use of wind energy. You can see it here:
Carl Oppedahl & Mary E. Tarduno, Wind Energy Conversion, 5 Harv. Entl. L. Rev. 431 (1981).
Today is the day — Lithuanian patent office and the DAS system
Today is the day that the State Patent Bureau of the Republic of Lithuania becomes trendy, modern and up-to-date. Today the Lithuanian patent office commences its participation in the DAS system for electronic interchange of priority documents. Continue reading “Today is the day — Lithuanian patent office and the DAS system”
Making a circuit breaker panel less dangerous
This blog article talks about a situation that comes up frequently in all of our daily lives — removing the front cover of a circuit breaker panel and working on the panel. The main point of today’s article is that in the circuit panel shown at right, we recently added the two yellow caps shown at A. This makes the circuit breaker panel less dangerous. Continue reading “Making a circuit breaker panel less dangerous”
D-Link IOT cloud evaporates
I was astonished to hear from D-Link that it has shut down its cloud that makes its smart plugs work. Pictured at right is one of the three DSP-W110 smart plugs that I purchased from D-Link in 2016. I still own the plugs and one of the plugs still has a device plugged into it — a table lamp.
But as of today, I cannot turn the lamp on or off using the app on my smart phone. As of today, the D-Link smart plugs don’t do anything any more. Continue reading “D-Link IOT cloud evaporates”