Category: Patents

Posted on

Time to sign up for the 20th annual AIPLA PCT Seminar

The 20th annual AIPLA PCT Seminar is now open for registration.

This will be Monday and Tuesday, July 25 and 26, in Alexandria, Virginia.

As a reminder the AIPLA PCT Seminar is different from other PCT Seminars in many ways.  One way that it is different is that it offers not only patent office speakers but also practitioners.  There are speakers from Europe and from China who will talk about using the PCT to get protection in EPO and in China.

Yours truly is one of the speakers.

For more information, or to sign up, or to book a hotel room at the seminar hotel, click here.

Posted on

The background music in the Nashville airport

A couple of weeks ago I had the honor of teaching a class at the annual meeting of the Tennessee Intellectual Property Law Association.  It was a delightful time.  The Association members made me feel welcome and the class went well.  (I spoke about best practices for use of the Patent Cooperation Treaty.)  But that’s not the point of today’s post.  The point of today’s post is to comment on the background music in the Nashville airport. Continue reading “The background music in the Nashville airport”

Posted on

Learning about Restoration of Priority

rop-speechToday I gave a presentation on Restoration of Priority.  This was at the AIPLA meeting in Minneapolis.  Here was the audience.  I guess about 150 people.  Also on the dais were Robert Sachs, talking about Section 101 and Alice, and Suzannah Sundby, talking about Section 101 in the biotech/pharma world.  You can download my slides here.

Posted on

USPTO does better with PPH requests lately

Yesterday the USPTO published a graph showing progress in disposing of what had been a very discouraging backlog of unattended-to Patent Prosecution Highwaypph-backlog requests.  Here is the graph:

From a glance at this graph, one might have the impression that the problem at the USPTO had started in October of 2015.  In fact the problem dated from at least as early as November 2014, when I blogged about ever-increasing delays at the USPTO in granting PPH requests.  In April of 2015 I had faxed a letter to Director Lee about this growing backlog.

USPTO’s graph indicates a backlog of unattended-to PPH requests of about 3200 cases in October 2015, reaching a peak of about 4000 in February 2016, and a notable drop to around 2400 as of a few weeks ago.  (I note that our firm, all by itself, was responsible for something like 2% of all of these PPH cases.)

The interesting question is how this effort at the USPTO is working out nowadays for particular applicants.  We try to track these things pretty closely at our firm, and here is what we see. Continue reading “USPTO does better with PPH requests lately”

Posted on

Please attend the OPLF reception in Orlando

Will you be in Orlando, Florida at the time of the 2016 meeting of INTA (the International Tbbking-logorademark Association)?  Are you a member of the E-Trademarks Listserv?  Are you with a trademark or patent firm located outside of the US? Or are you with a corporation?  If so, we hope you will join the people of Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC at our reception for the E-Trademarks Listserv.  Our reception will take place at B B King’s Blues Club from 5PM to 8PM on Tuesday, May 24.

To learn more abut the reception, and to RSVP, please click here.

Posted on

New Financial Manager system connects with more and more USPTO e-commerce systems

USPTO launched its “Financial Manager” system about two weeks ago.  (At the same time, USPTO permanently shut down the wonderful “Financial Profile” system that had served users well for many years.)

When the Financial Manager (“FM”) system launched two weeks ago, it was connected with one e-commerce system, namely the system for paying patent maintenance fees.  I blogged about the new maintenance fee payment system here.

Today the USPTO connected its new FM system to TEAS, the e-filing system for trademark application. I blogged about this new connection here.

This means that trademark filers no longer have to key in an entire credit card number when paying a fee. The filer can simply select the card from a drop-down list of stored payment mechanisms.

Today the USPTO also connected its new FM system to the online ordering system of the Office of Public Records. This ordering system, with the catchy name “OEMS”, now likewise permits you to select a payment mechanism from a stored list. This saves you having to key in detailed credit card information when placing such orders.

I have heard that in about a week, USPTO plans to connect FM to the EFS-Web system.

It’s clear from these developments that we all need to get familiar with FM. Presumably you configured your FM user accounts two weeks ago. But if you have not done so yet, you can visit the Financial Manager setup page to set things up.

Have you used FM?  Please post a comment below to let readers know how it went for you.