Category: Patents

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A defect in USPTO’s “Display References” tab

When the time comes to pay an Issue Fee, one item on your checklist is to look in the Display References tab in PAIR to see if there are any not-yet-considered IDSs, right?

The USPTO itself has a similar workflow task when an Issue Fee gets paid — some clerk at the USPTO looks to see if there are any not-yet-considered IDSs and bounces the case back to the Examiner if there are any found in this workflow.  Does that clerk rely upon the Display References tab in PAIR to look for not-yet-considered IDSs?  Maybe the answer is “yes”.

When a patent Examiner at the USPTO picks up a case to examine it, the Examiner is supposed to consider the IDSs that have been filed.  Does the Examiner rely upon the Display References tab in PAIR to look for not-yet-considered IDSs?  Maybe the answer is “yes”.

I was astonished recently to learn that there is a category of IDS that the USPTO fails to include in the Display References tab.  This defect in PAIR (and there is a corresponding defect in the Display References tab in Patentcenter) requires urgent repair by the USPTO.  Between now and whenever (or if) the USPTO gets around to repairing this defect, the situation represents a trap for the unwary practitioner.  

Do you, loyal reader, already know what category of IDS I am talking about here?  
Continue reading “A defect in USPTO’s “Display References” tab”

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What to do if your email service provider is blocking our listserv postings

Back on about November 17 we migrated our listserv server from a shared-hosting server to a dedicated server.  This means that our listserv postings are coming from a different IP address now than they used to.

It seems that some email service providers have hair-trigger spam fighting systems that react in a very strong way to email traffic emanating from a new IP address.  Some of the members of our listservs have have found that some or even all of our listserv messages are failing to reach them.

if this has happened to you, there are several things that you can do to help. Continue reading “What to do if your email service provider is blocking our listserv postings”

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Only 103 “Super Patent” slots remaining out of 500

Readers will recall my blog article about “Super Patents” and how to get them.  The idea is to file a PCT application and be fortunate enough that it gets accepted into the Collaborative Search and Examination (“CS&E”) pilot program.

This is a pilot program created by the five biggest patent offices (China, Europe, Japan, Korea, US) in which an applicant gets to have its claims searched and examined by all five patent offices.  The pilot program began about a year and a half ago and will wrap up in 2020.  

The way that the pilot program was set up, each of the five Offices was willing to take on the role of ISA for purposes of CS&E in one hundred PCT applications.  Doing the math, this means that all told, five hundred PCT applicants would be so lucky as to get their applications into this program.

Each Office, in its role as ISA, was thus necessarily keeping track of the number of PCT applications that it had accepted into the CS&E program.  Each Office would stop accepting new cases once it hit the limit of one hundred.

One of the offices hit its limit of one hundred a couple of weeks ago, and another office hit its limit just yesterday.  Which raises the natural question, right now in January of 2020, how many slots are still open?  I’ll tell you. Continue reading “Only 103 “Super Patent” slots remaining out of 500″

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Another fax bites the dust – Swiss Federal Institute of Intellectual Property

Yes, that patent office.  The one where Albert Einstein worked as a patent examiner for a while before becoming famous.  The Swiss patent office has has joined the ever-growing list of patent offices (previous blog post) that have officially stopped receiving faxes.  You can see that Office’s January 2, 2020 update in the PCT Applicant’s Guide in which that Office notifies that it is pulling the plug on its fax machine.

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Get your numbers in for the 2019 Tote Boards

It’s that time of year again.   Get your numbers in if you want your firm to be listed in:

  • the Eighth Annual US Design Patent Top Filers Tote Board
  • the Fifth Annual US Trademark Registration Top Filers Tote Board
  • the Fifth Annual US Utility Patent Top Filers Tote Board
  • the Third Annual US Plant Patent Top Filers Tote Board

These Tote Boards will rank the top patent and trademark firms for carrying out filings in 2019 in these categories.  The 2019 Tote Boards will join the previous fifteen Tote Boards which go back as far as 2012.

The closing date for getting in your numbers will be Friday, January 31, 2020.

Every year, some firm misses out by failing to get its numbers in by the closing date.  Don’t be that firm!  Get your numbers in early.  Click here for the:

  • response form for the 2019 (eighth annual) US design patent top filers tote board
  • response form for the 2019 (fifth annual) US trademark registration top filers tote board
  • response form for the 2019 (fifth annual) US utility patent top filers tote board
  • response form for the 2019 (third annual) US plant patent top filers tote board
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January 1, 2020 is a holiday at the USPTO

Wednesday, January 1, 2020 will be a federal holiday in the District of Columbia.  This means the USPTO will be closed.  This means that any action that would be due at the USPTO on January 1 will be timely if it is done by Thursday, January 2, 2020.

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“Fewer”, not “less”

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Update:  it took more than two years, but the USPTO has just recently cleared this trouble ticket.

There’s a bit of bad grammar in Patentcenter.   If you are using Patentcenter to look at a patent application, the number of inventors might exceed four.  In that case you might click “show all inventors” to see all of the inventors.  Then you would see a Patentcenter screen listing all of the inventors, an example of which appears at right.

You might then want to return to the normal screen that does not show all of the inventors.  For this, the designers of Patentcenter chose the words “Show less inventors” which is wrong.  A similar mistake is often made in stores where an overhead sign might say that the express checkout lane is for those with “ten or less items”.  The correct wording would be “ten or fewer items”.  You can see explanations of this here and here.

The correct way to say this in Patentcenter would, of course, be “Show fewer inventors”.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes the folks at USPTO to correct this mistake.  (This is trouble ticket number CP10.)  (Update.  It took more than two years.)

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What these three things have in common?

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Here are images showing three things, one of which is the  two-factor authentication box on the USPTO web site.  That box used to say “This is a computer that I trust and use regularly” (blog article, October 8, 2019) but recently the USPTO changed the wording of this box.  Now it says “Remember this browser and do not ask again for 24 hours.”  Although USPTO changed the wording in the box, I do not think USPTO changed anything about the actual function of the box.  This prompts me to invite the reader to post a comment below if you can think of something that is similar about these three things.