Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
Today marks the twelfth anniversary of the TTABlog. Yes, the first-ever posting of the TTABlog was on November 8, 2004. Congratulations and thanks to John L. Welch for all these years of service to the trademark community!
By comparison the Ant-Like Persistence blog is a mere 2½ years old.
Again, kudos and thanks to John!
A week ago I blogged that filers filing things at WIPO would have an extra hour to get a same-day filing date. As of a week ago, you could file as late as 5 PM Mountain Time and still get a same-day filing date.
Now today things return to normal. To get a same-day filing date at WIPO, you will need to file by 4 PM.
When parties fight over who should own an Internet domain name, sometimes it is easy to see who should win and who should lose. Sometimes it’s clear that the domain name owner is a cybersquatter, and the complainant should win. But other times it is the opposite — the domain name owner is innocent of any wrongdoing and what’s going on is that a covetous party wishes they could wrest the domain name away from its owner. This blog article describes such a case, with an outcome that I find particularly gratifying.
Experienced filers in the Patent Cooperation Treaty, Madrid Protocol, and Hague Agreement systems (utility patents, trademarks, and industrial designs) know that it is important to keep always in mind when midnight will arrive in Geneva, where WIPO is located.
For a PCT filer, this matters because to get a same-day filing date, a PCT application being filed in RO/IB will need to be filed by 4 PM Mountain Time. The same is true for filing an Article 19 amendment. The same is true if you are using ePCT to file a Demand and Article 34 amendment.
For a Madrid filer, this matters among other things for the payment of decade renewal fees.
For a Hague filer, this matters for the the filing of an international design application at the IB.
The point of today’s post is that starting today, and for the next week, you get an extra hour to get a same-day filing date. The reason is that Europe and the US carry out their daylight saving time transitions on different days that are a week apart.
This means that you could file as late as 5 PM Mountain Time (instead of the usual 4 PM) and still get a same-day filing date.
Things will return to normal a week from now, on November 6, 2016.
The other day one of our valued employees at our firm happened to ask me how we picked the name of our publishing arm, Penaya Publishing. In response, I launched into a discussion of the factors that we urge clients to consider when picking a new name for a company or product or service, and the result was that I felt yet another blog article coming on. Here it is, a discussion of factors that we urge a client to consider when picking a new name for a company or product or service. I hope readers will post their comments and suggestions below. Continue reading “Picking a new trademark”
I will offer a few thoughts on how a trademark practitioner might pick when (during the prosecution of an ITU trademark application) to hand in the specimen of use. (I will assume the simple case in which a trademark application contains just one trademark class. In such a trademark application, there is generally a need only to hand in one specimen of use.)
The idea of an ITU application is that the applicant is not claiming to have actually used the mark in interstate commerce, but is merely professing to have a bona fide intention to use the mark in commerce at some time in the future.
Continue reading “Picking when to hand in a specimen of use?”
Brunei has joined Madrid Protocol.
Brunei deposited its instrument of accession today, October 6, 2016.
The Protocol will enter into force for the purposes of Brunei on January 6, 2017.
This brings the number of members of the Madrid system to 98.
The two-letter code for Brunei is BN.
Readers will recall (see blog articles here and here and here) that in 2015, Donald Trump filed a number of trademark applications for “MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN”. Two are now registered and the other two have Noti
ces of Allowance.
Someone has now filed a cancellation petition seeking to cancel one of the registrations (quoted at right).
The Answer is due November 7, 2016, which I note is a day before election day.
USPTO’s new Financial Manager system is supposed to be a replacement to the much-loved system that came before, called Financial Profile. For many many years FP would let the user do a search for transactions of interest and the search could, if desired, be carried out across all possible payment methods.
For our billing staff an example of a daily recurring task was to do a search looking for all of the payments that happened since two days ago, across all of our (approximately a dozen) payment methods.
With FP this was a matter of a few mouse clicks.
And of course what the designers of FM were supposed to do (but did not do very well) was to replicate the user functions of FP in FM. Unfortunately when USPTO released FM, the FM system did not permit any search across all payment methods. It meant for example that our billing staff were forced to do about a dozen searches each day instead of a single search, so as to identify all of the transactions that had happened in the past day or two.
One annoying aspect of FM was that when USPTO released FM, on April 8, 2016, USPTO shut down FP. So if some important feature in FP was missing from FM, there was nothing the customer could do about it. USPTO should have kept FP running in parallel with FM until all of the features of FP had been migrated over to FM.
I blogged about this search-across-all-payment-methods deficiency on June 29, 2016.
I am delighted to be able to report that on August 10, USPTO finally migrated the search-across-all-payment-methods feature to FM.
For four months (starting with the abrupt shut-down of FP), customers were denied the feature. But now the feature is back.
This is a welcome development.
Now let’s hope that the USPTO folks can keep up the good work, providing for example the user features that I detailed in this blog article on June 22, 2016.
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.)