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One of the dumbest things that you can do when you are naming your intellectual property firm, it turns out, is picking a name that is more than 35 characters in length. If you make this mistake, it means you often can’t get paid.
A related dumb thing is arranging to have a street address that exceeds 35 characters in length. This, too, might mean that you can’t get paid.
It turns out that there is a simple and quick fix for this problem, as I will mention at the end of this blog article.
Here, of course with necessary redactions, is the gist of an email that I sent to a patent client today. The main point of the email message was to try to explain why the dollar amount of a bill was much smaller than one would normally expect it to be. There was also a second communications goal for the email, which is to explain how it is that we apparently are going to get an allowance essentially instantly from an art unit that has a First Office Action Prediction that is “pegged” at 30 months and in which the true number, if the USPTO were to be candid about it, is surely a much higher number of months than 30. Continue reading “A happy email to a client”
Yesterday the USPTO posted a very odd notice telling all of its customers who use Time-base One-Time Password apps for two-factor authentication that between now and May 1, 2022, they need to discard their existing Secret Code Number and get a new Secret Code Number. As I blogged yesterday (blog article) the notice is strikingly close to being content-free, explaining almost nothing about what it is trying to say. Alert reader Gerry Peters posted a comment to my blog article that made me realize that not only was the USPTO notice nearly content-free, but it also used the word “mobile” in an extremely awkward way. Gerry pointed out that a succinct writer could simply have used the two-word phrase “authenticator app” throughout the USPTO notice, and that instead the writer went to the special point of inserting the word “mobile” no fewer than seven times into the notice, forming the three-word phrase “mobile authenticator app” all seven times.
Gerry pointed out that most users of USPTO systems like PAIR and EFS-Web and Patentcenter and TEAS (all of which require the use of two-factor authentication) almost certainly do not log in on a mobile phone but instead log in on a desktop or notebook computer. Gerry pointed out, correctly, that the everyday shorthand phrase that most people use as a substitute for the accurate but rather longer phrase “Time-base One-Time Password app” is simply the two-word phase “authenticator app”. Gerry wondered whether the seven-time insertion of “mobile” into the phrase was merely a sort of nervous tic, a completely unnecessary addition of a throwaway word, or whether the three-word phrase seemingly so carefully constructed and so consistently employed from the top to the bottom of the USPTO notice might have some significance. Maybe for example the need for users to go through this complicated process of discarding an existing Secret Code Number and getting a new Secret Code number is limited to that subset of users who use mobile devices for logging in at the USPTO?
Having read Gerry’s comment, and having given the matter quite a bit of thought, I conclude two things. Continue reading “Why the word “mobile” in that odd USPTO notice yesterday?”
Many of us use an authenticator app such as Authy or Google Authenticator as our way of doing two-factor authentication when logging in at the USPTO. Many of us recall the USPTO crash of about a year ago (blog article), that forced us to do another setup of our USPTO authenticator app settings. Now comes a strikingly content-free announcement from the USPTO that we must all do yet another setup of our USPTO authenticator app settings. Why is it, exactly, that we must do this? I think I figured it out. Continue reading “Why you are forced to do yet another setup of your USPTO authenticator app settings”
Yesterday this new book The 2022 Schwegman Advanced PCT Training: the presentation slides was at position #65 in Amazon’s best-seller ranking of “adult and continuing education”. Today it is at position #9. Continue reading “Now #9 in adult and continuing education”
Amazon maintains sales statistics on every large or small thing that a person could possibly want to know about its book sales. My newly released book The 2022 Schwegman Advanced PCT Training: the presentation slides has apparently just now reached a ranking of number 63 in Amazon’s category of adult and continuing education. As you can see in the screen shot at right, this book trails two positions below a study guide for a commercial drivers license test.
I think that this tells you not so much about a large number of copies of my book being purchased, but instead about the relatively small number of books that people purchase that fall within this category of adult and continuing education.
For context, Amazon says that among books generally, my newly released book has a “best sellers” ranking in position 112,026.
On March 13 I blogged that US filers filing documents at the International Bureau needed to pay extra close attention to what time it is in Switzerland. The reason is that in the US, Daylight Saving Time happened on March 13. But it did not happen on that day in Switzerland. This meant that for the past two weeks, a US-based filer in (for example) the Mountain Time zone would be able to e-file in the IB as late as 5PM and still get a same-day filing date. This differed from the usual drop-dead time of 4PM.
Today (March 27, 2022) is the day that Daylight Saving Time happens in Switzerland. The consequence of this is that the time difference between the US filer’s time zone and the time at the IB is back to normal. So for a US-based filer in the Mountain Time zone, the drop-dead time returns today to the usual 4PM.
This change affects for example a US-based filer filing a PCT application at the RO/IB, and it affects the US-based filer filing a design application in the IB’s Hague Agreement e-filing system. It also affects the US-based filer filing documents at the IB relating to the Madrid Protocol, such as for example a Subsequent Designation.
Most readers of my blog will appreciate that the correct terminology is not “Daylight Savings Time” but “Daylight Saving Time”.
Many readers will also appreciate that EU has been trying for the past two years to get rid of this clock-changing. There have also been largely feckless efforts in various states of the US to bring an end to this clock-changing. I personally would like it if the place where I am located, and the places where patent and trademark offices are that I care about, would all bring an end to clock-changing.
What weighs more than two kilograms (more than 4½ pounds), is more than four centimeters thick (more than an inch and a half), costs about twenty dollars, contains two of every presentation slide from my recent fourteen-hour webinar series of advanced training on the Patent Cooperation Treaty, and can serve as an extremely functional doorstop? The answer is, of course, two of the books at right, duct-taped together. Continue reading “A very good doorstop, or two PCT training books”
Today in a particular patent application I uploaded two PDFs in Patentcenter. The Ack Receipt says I uploaded five PDFs (which is not true). When I try to match up the three non-existent PDFs that the Ack Receipt says I uploaded (which I did not) with the three supposedly corresponding PDFs in IFW, the file names do not match and the SHA-512 hashes (message digests) do not match and the file sizes do not match. Nothing about this part of the Ack Receipt is true. Continue reading “Patentcenter Ack Receipt lies”
Would you like to attend a free-of-charge two-day advanced course on the Patent Cooperation Treaty? Here is your opportunity. This series of fifteen lectures on the PCT is available free of charge. You can watch these lectures from anywhere in the world, at whatever hour of the day or night is convenient for you. You can watch these lectures on your computer, on your smart phone, or on a tablet. You could project the lectures onto a big screen in a conference room and watch the lectures as a group activity.