Category: Trademarks

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Financial Manager forcing password changes

Some months ago I griped that the USPTO’s new Financial Manager system had a much-too-short sixty-day period for forcing users to change passwords.  (Fourth bad thing about FM, blog post of June 22, 2016.)

After this, some listserv members reported doing password changes and being told by FM that the next change would be six months in the future.  This sounded like good news to me.

I also found, as of a couple of months ago, that when the FM system would force me to change my password, I could simply “change” it to the same password that I was using before.

Now it seems there have been at least two customer-unfriendly steps backwards.  The time period for forced expiration of an FM password seems to have been cut back to a mere sixty days again.  And the system now refuses to let me enter the same password as before.  Indeed someone at the USPTO with too much time on their hands has gone to the trouble of coding this step so that I am denied the ability to use any of the previous twenty-four passwords that I have used before.

Again this makes things less secure, rather than more secure.  It guarantees that the user will have no choice but to write the password down and tape it to the computer monitor.

We customers are grown-ups and we can make our own decisions what sort of password we are happy with.  (It’s not good that the system imposes unnecessary requirements about the password having to contain a capital letter and lower-case letter and a smiley face and a punctuation mark and a numerical digit, and requiring that it be at least twenty-four characters in length, and so on.)

We can make our own decisions when we want to change our passwords.  (It’s not good that the system forces a change every sixty days.)

 

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USPTO makes a little progress on web server security

Back in August of 2014 I blogged about the urgent need for USPTO to use “https://” instead of “https://” in all of its servers.  In June of 2015 I noted that USPTO had made no progress on this, so I blogged about it again.  I am delighted to be able to report that USPTO has now made a baby step.  On August 11, 2016, USPTO made an announcement about this.

Continue reading “USPTO makes a little progress on web server security”

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USPTO failed to go to Capitol Hill about the massive system crash

It will be recalled that USPTO had a massive systems crash on December 22, 2015 which shut down every one of USPTO’s external-facing e-commerce systems, including the EFS-Web system for filing of patent applications and the TEAS system for filing of trademark applications.

On December 23, 2015 USPTO purported to “deem” December 22 and 23 to be holidays.  The next day, I pointed out (see blog article) that USPTO probably lacked the power to do this.  I said that the USPTO needed to head over to Capitol Hill to get a special bill passed which would cause December 22 and 23, 2015 to be real holidays (for purposes of the USPTO).

It was, of course, only a matter of time before the USPTO’s power to “deem” a day to be a federal holiday in the District of Columbia would be tested in litigation.  And now that day has come. Continue reading “USPTO failed to go to Capitol Hill about the massive system crash”

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The end of expensive law school casebooks?

I teach advanced patent prosecution as an adjunct professor at the University of Denver.  I hear from my students what it costs these days to buy a casebook for a class.  Some cost $150.  Some cost $200.  So I am delighted to see that there is some movement in the direction of reducing this cost for the student.  It comes from publishing-on-demand services such as Createspace and Lulu, as I will describe. Continue reading “The end of expensive law school casebooks?”

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A way to make a TEAS form friendlier

Those trademark practitioners whose clients include companies located outside of the US will be familiar with the so-called Section 44e filing basis.  This is the filing basis that honors Article 6quinquies of the Paris Convention.  It permits a would-be applicant in the USPTO to get a free pass (for six years) on having to prove use in commerce in the US.  To qualify for this filing basis, and thus to get the six-year free pass, the applicant must establish that the same applicant earlier obtained a non-US trademark registration for the same mark.  The goods/services identified in the registration are required to “cover” the goods/services identified in the US application.  A further requirement is that the registration is required to come from the place that is the “country of origin” for the applicant.  Finally, the registration needs to be valid and subsisting, and needs to have an expiration date far enough in the future to make it likely the US prosecution would reach is conclusion prior to the expiration date.

The problem is that the TEAS forms for such a US trademark application are actively unfriendly to many applicants, namely those applicants for which the office of registration provides cryptographically protected certificates of registration.  I’ll explain. Continue reading “A way to make a TEAS form friendlier”

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Another defective TEAS form to fix

Readers will recall that I blogged over a year ago about a defect in a TEAS form, namely the Section 71 and 15 form.  This is the form that permits the owner of a US trademark registration that came from a Madrid Protocol application to renew the registration, and at the same time to make the registration incontestable.  The defect that I reported back then was that the TEAS form would sometimes force the filer to pay a “grace period” fee even if no grace fee was actually due.

Another defect in this particular TEAS form has surfaced.  Suppose the registration is between 9 and 10 years old and has not yet been made incontestable.  Then it should make sense to permit the filer to use this Section-71-and-15 form.  But the form won’t work.  The form will refuse to proceed, stating (untruthfully) that the registrant is not permitted to do a Section 71 filing at this time as well as a Section 15 filing.

I reported this problem to the USPTO over a year ago.  It still has not been fixed.

When I reported this defect in the TEAS 71-and-15 form, USPTO suggested a workaround, namely to give up and do the Section 71 filing in one e-filing project and to do the Section 15 filing in another e-filing project.  I guess strictly speaking this does count as a “workaround”, but it is not a very good workaround.  It forces the US practitioner, and the foreign trademark firm, and the client of the foreign trademark firm, to deal with twice as many emails, and twice as many settings and clearings of dockets, and twice as many opportunities for an e-signature to go wrong.  It also forces the participants to deal with a doubled risk of a lost email.

The challenge, I guess, for the developer of the TEAS form, is that the TEAS form needs to check for several conditions to be satisfied:

  • today’s date is within the relevant window (5 to 6 years, or 9 to 10 years, or 19 to 20 years, etc.),
  • the registration is at least 5 years old, and
  • the registration has not already been made “incontestable”.

It strikes me that this coding task should be well within the ability of even a relatively novice programmer.  It seems to me that even if a team of two or three coders were to be required, they could accomplish this coding task in less than one day.  I’d be glad to contribute a day’s worth of pizza and energy drinks to get this coding task completed.

I had hoped that by now USPTO would have gotten this fixed.   But as of now, it is still impossible to use the 71-and-15 TEAS form for any window later than the 5-to-6 window.

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Six days remaining to migrate your EFT methods to FM

USPTO rolled out its FM (Financial Manager) system in April of 2016. One of the USPTO’s goals is to force every customer using EFT (electronic funds transfer) for USPTO payments to migrate its EFT method into the FM system. To this end, USPTO has set a last possible date of June 30, 2016 (six days from now) for this task.

If you miss the June 30, 2016 date, USPTO says it will simply shut down your EFT method. To be able to use EFT in future, you will have to create a new EFT arrangement. Setting up an EFT payment method involves an eight-day delay. So you would have a gap of some days or weeks during which you would be unable to use EFT for paying USPTO fees.

Clearly it will save you a lot of trouble if you can get your EFT payment method migrated into the FM system before the remaining six days have passed.

In our office we have two EFTs set up (drawing from two different bank accounts).  We found that the migration of the EFT methods into FM was not very difficult (as compared with the high level of difficulty to migrate our Deposit Account).

The chief challenge is that once the EFT methods got migrated, each of the users within our firm had to go through a complicated and annoying process of constructing extra passwords for use of the EFT methods.  The result is that each user had to print out yet another password and tape it to his or her computer screen.  So much for improving security with these things.

Have you already migrated your EFT payment methods into FM?  How did it go?  Please post a comment below.

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Six days remaining to migrate your Deposit Account to FM

USPTO rolled out its FM (Financial Manager) system in April of 2016. One of the USPTO’s goals is to force every holder of a Deposit Account to migrate its Deposit Account into the FM system. To this end, USPTO has set a last possible date of June 30, 2016 (six days from now) for this task.

If you miss the June 30, 2016 date, USPTO says it will simply shut down your Deposit Account and drop a refund check in the mail to the last known mailing address for the Deposit Account. To be able to use a Deposit Account in future, you will have to create a new Deposit Account and load money into it. Very likely this would take a week or so. So you would have a gap of some days or weeks during which you would be unable to use a Deposit Account for paying USPTO fees. Hopefully the refund check would not get lost in the mail.

Clearly it will save you a lot of trouble if you can get your Deposit Account migrated into the FM system before the remaining six days have passed. To do this, you will need an “authorization code” that you don’t have and that USPTO probably never provided to you. To obtain this crucial “authorization code”, call up the Deposit Account Branch at 571-272-6500. When we called, a few weeks ago, the person who gave us our “authorization code” was a nice person named Rebecca.

I expect this migration process will be particularly difficult or impossible for USPTO customers with complicated Deposit Account arrangements.  For example a large corporation with several outside counsel firms may have a single Deposit Account which it permits the outside firms to use.  Each of the outside counsel firms might phone up Rebecca trying to learn the crucial “authorization code”.  June 30 might come and go without the migration being successfully accomplished.

How did your Deposit Account migration go?  Do you have any tips to share?  Please post a comment.