Category: Industrial Designs

Posted on

Most-read postings in “Ant-like Persistence” for 2014

The arrival of a new year prompts every blogger to look back to see which postings in the previous year reached a lot of eyeballs.

Well, by far the most-read posting for all of 2014 in Ant-like Persistence was “A little-known USPTO initiative to reduce the backlog“.  This posting, dating from early April of 2014, might be of great interest to patent practitioners who missed the original posting.

In second place was “USPTO is closed today, Monday, March 17“.  This was the posting that told readers that it was a snow day in Washington.  It meant that anything that needed to be filed in the USPTO on Monday March 17 could be postponed until Tuesday March 18 and still be timely.

The people who subscribe to this blog are likely to hear of such USPTO closings in the future.  So if you have not already done so, subscribe to the blog.  And if you have a friend or colleague who would like to hear about it when the USPTO has a snow day, encourage them to subscribe to the blog.

 

Posted on

29 days remaining to submit your design patent count for 2014

As you will recall from this posting, I will be publishing a report in February of 2015 listing patent firms and the numbers of US design patents they obtained for clients in 2014.  In that posting I invited each firm to submit its count of US design patents obtained in 2014 (and 2013, and 2012).  As of right now, five patent firms have responded.  Between them, those five firms obtained 418 US design patents in 2014, 443 US design patents in 2013, and 432 US design patents in 2012.

There are 29 days left for submissions.  There are perhaps a hundred or so patent firms that did significant numbers of US design patent filings that issued in 2014, meaning that there are perhaps 95 or so submissions still to come.  If you are with a firm that obtained US design patents for clients in 2014, I encourage you to read the original posting to see an easy way to do the database search to count your US design patent grants, and to send in your submission.

And if you know someone who is with a firm that obtained US design patents for clients in 2014, I encourage you to pass this posting along to that person so that they will know about the opportunity to respond.

Posted on

Submit your design patent total for the 2014 US design patent rankings

How many US design patents did your firm handle in 2014?  The last ones for 2014 issued yesterday, Tuesday, December 30.  So now you can figure out how many you filed in 2014, and send in your submission for our ranking.  Here is the questionnaire for you to complete and submit.

I will publish the results in February of 2015.

Continue reading “Submit your design patent total for the 2014 US design patent rankings”

Posted on

USPTO will be closed Friday, December 26

The USPTO will be closed Friday, December 26, 2014.  Any action or fee due on Friday, December 26, 2014, would be considered timely if filed on the next succeeding business day, specifically, Monday, December 29, 2014.  You can see this on the USPTO web site here and here.

A big thank you goes to Bryan Wheelock and Matthew Hintz who provided the citations to the items on the USPTO web site.

Yet another nice person (Scott Barrett) points out that apparently this closure was announced by the White House on December 5, 2014.

Posted on

Ghost art unit apparently disbanded

On November 19 I blogged about the “Ghost Art Unit” at the USPTO.  This was art unit 2910, headed by SPEs Cathron Brooks and Joel Sincavage.  This was a curious art unit with no Examiners.  Our firm had some fifteen design patent applications stalled in this art unit.  The cases had no First Office Action Prediction, which was no surprise given that the art unit had no Examiners.  A comment by a USPTO person gave me the impression that a couple of thousand design patent applications, all GUI (graphical user interface) applications, were assigned to this art unit. Continue reading “Ghost art unit apparently disbanded”

Posted on

Getting out of the ghost art unit at the USPTO

Well, one of our oldest design patent applications, one that had been parked in the “ghost art unit” for some seven months, is now out of the ghost art unit.  Just today it got transferred to art unit 2911, and after some seven months without a First Office Action Prediction (“FOAP”), it again has an FOAP.

The FOAP is six months, that is, USPTO now estimates that it will examine this case in about June of 2015.

USPTO’s First Office Action Estimator says that for a newly filed application in art unit 2911, the estimated time for a newly filed design patent application to get a first office action is 13 months from now.

What’s weird about this is that our application was filed September 23, 2013.  With a backlog of 13 months, this would suggest our application should have been examined in about October of 2013.  Over a month ago.  Our seven months in the ghost art unit seem to have pushed this application back in the queue so that it will get examined much later than it should have.

Well you take what you can get.  At least this application is now back in the normal Examining Corps and after some seven months of being unable to do so, we can once again track its progress through the system.

We have over a dozen other design patent applications that were filed more recently than this one, that are still parked in the ghost art unit.  We will continue to keep an eye on them and hopefully they too will eventually be transferred to a real art unit.

Posted on

USPTO credit card limit to be cut back still further

We get a lot of frequent flyer miles every year paying fees to the USPTO and WIPO by credit card.  The miles that we get are chicken feed compared with the frequent flyer miles that the really big filers — the Oblons and Sughrues of the world — may receive in this way.

Paying a fee by credit card offers the further benefit that we can “float” the cost for a month, and hopefully the client’s payment of its bill will happen promptly enough that we can pay the credit card bill in full using the money that just came in from the client.

Having said this, we note that the USPTO keeps tinkering with its credit-card payment system in ways that make it harder and harder to pay by credit card.  Just today USPTO announced another change.

Continue reading “USPTO credit card limit to be cut back still further”

Posted on

The ghost art unit at the USPTO

There’s a ghost art unit at the USPTO.  It has patent applications assigned to it, but it has no Examiners.  If you have the bad luck to have one of your patent applications assigned to this ghost art unit, the application will never get examined.  At least, it will never get examined for so long as it sits in this art unit.

At our firm we try to track the FOAPs — first office action predictions — for our pending patent applications.  We try to keep track of which art units are bogged down and which ones take up new applications sooner.  We stumbled upon the existence of this ghost art unit when we kept noticing that some of our pending applications had no FOAP at all.

Continue reading “The ghost art unit at the USPTO”