Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
This is a busy time for good news about DAS.
The last time I blogged about Georgia and DAS was on March 20, 2019 (see article). At that time, the news was that Georgia had joined the DAS system.
Now the news is that Georgia has joined the DAS system as an Accessing Office and as a Depositing Office with respect to trademark applications. This took effect as of September 17, 2021.
This is a busy time for good news about DAS. One piece of good news about DAS is that the Intellectual Property Office of Ireland will become an Accessing Office in DAS on February 17, 2022. It will participate as an Accessing Office with respect to the following:
Hello Folks. There are five days remaining to hand in your numbers for the 2021 Tote Boards.
Every year, after the Tote Boards get finished and published, an email message will arrive from some law firm that did not hand in its numbers on time. The law firm begs to please be included in one or another of the Tote Boards. The result of course, is that some other firm that was, say, listed in third place in one of the Tote Boards might now end up in fourth place. But that firm might already have posted on their web site that they had earned third place on a Tote Board!
The way to avoid such problems of course is simply for you to hand in your numbers before the closing date. This year, the closing date will be Wednesday, February 2, 2022. That is five days from now. Please get your numbers in by the close of business on Wednesday, February, 2022. To hand in your numbers, click here.
Two business days have passed since I announced the opening of the opportunity for firms to hand in their numbers for the 2021 Tote Boards. You can see the past tote boards here. These are the listings of law firms, ranked according to which firms obtained how many patents and trademarks registrations for their clients in the previous calendar year.
In these first two business days we have received reports from about two dozen firms.
Clearly there are quite a few firms that have not yet handed in their numbers.
As a reminder, the questionnaires will close on Wednesday, February 2, 2022. If you have not yet handed in your firm’s numbers, please do so right away. There is no good reason to foot-drag on handing in your numbers.
To hand in your numbers, click here.
Update: The results are in. You can see the results here.
You can see the past Tote Boards here.
These Tote Boards are part of a tradition that extends back to 2012 when I published the first Design Patent Tote Board. Please send in your numbers now. We will close the entries in two weeks, that is, on Wednesday, February 2, 2022. Here are the four Tote Boards for which your numbers are needed. Continue reading “It is time to send in your numbers for the 2021 Tote Boards”
It looks like all USPTO systems (TEAS, MyUSPTO, Patentcenter, EFS-Web, PAIR) are broken or very very sluggish. Listserv members are reporting timeouts, forced logouts, and lack of responsiveness from the USPTO systems.
As is so often the case during such crashes, there is no mention or acknowledgment of any of this on the USPTO system status page.
Friday, December 24, 2021 will be a federal holiday in the District of Columbia. This means the USPTO will be closed that day. This means that any action that might be due at the USPTO on December 24 or December 25 or December 26 will be timely if accomplished by Monday, December 27, 2021.
Friday, December 31, 2021 will be a federal holiday in the District of Columbia. This means the USPTO will be closed that day. This means that any action that might be due at the USPTO on December 31 or January 1 or January 2 will be timely if accomplished by Monday, January 3, 2022.
The TEAS system is the system that trademark practitioners use to generate documents to be reviewed and e-signed by clients. A typical form to be reviewed and signed by a client might be a new trademark application or a six-year renewal or a ten-year renewal. There is a sort of design flaw in the TEAS system that represents a long-felt need for correction. This blog article describes the design flaw and describes two possible ways to address the design flaw. Continue reading “A long-felt need in the TEAS system”
Here is what the USPTO announced a few minutes ago about the massive system crash that started yesterday evening:
On Wednesday, December 15, 2021, at approximately 8:30 p.m. ET, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) proactively and deliberately shut down all external access to systems in light of a serious and time-sensitive concern related to Log4j vulnerabilities. Although this preventative measure impacted those seeking to file documents, the USPTO needed to shut down the systems to perform necessary maintenance to safeguard not only our infrastructure, but also the security of our filers’ data. The USPTO created a path for filers to continue to submit applications via email during the outage. Around 8:30 a.m. ET on Thursday, December 16, maintenance was completed and all external systems were restored.
Several things can be said about this.
First, the USPTO announcement is not accurate about the start time of the crash. USPTO customers started seeing login problems at about 7PM Eastern Time.
Second, I will note that alert blog reader Chris called it! Chris posted a comment very early this morning that you can see here (scroll down a bit) correctly guessing that this would turn out to be USPTO’s explanation for the outage.
Third, yes we have all been reading about Log4j vulnerabilities and yes of course it is prudent to take whatever steps one needs to take to protect against those vulnerabilities. But this particular vulnerability was publicly disclosed on Thursday, December 9. Nowhere in the USPTO announcement is there any explanation as to why the corrective action was taken only six days later. Nor is there any explanation why the starting time selected for this work was during working hours (for USPTO customers) rather than at the normal time for such corrective actions which is shortly past midnight on whatever day the work is to be done.
I have some guesses as to what went wrong to bring down all of those USPTO systems yesterday evening. Continue reading “My guesses as to what caused yesterday’s massive system crash”