Category: Trademarks

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Get listed in the 2015 US Utility Patent and Trademark Tote Boards!

Horror vacui.  At the beginning of each calendar year, we are all accustomed to adding up our US utility patent totals and US trademark totals, and sending them to Intellectual Property Today magazine so that they may be listed in the IP Today tote boards.  But as far as I can tell, IP Today is out of business.

As you know, for two years now this blog has sponsored a US design patent tote board.  The apparent demise of IP Today has prompted me to set up successor tote boards for US utility patents and US trademark registrations.

If you would like your firm to be listed in the 2015 US design patent tote board, please act quickly because I plan to close responses for that tote board at the end of the day on February 1, 2016.

If you would like your firm to be listed in the 2015 US utility patent tote board, please respond here by February 15, 2016.

If you would like your firm to be listed in the 2015 US trademark registration tote board, please respond here by February 15, 2016.

These tote boards won’t serve their readers well unless nearly everybody gets listed.  So please forward this blog post to everybody you know who might like to be listed and who might not be aware of this opportunity.

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Tuesday will also be a snow day at the USPTO

Today, Monday, January 25, 2016 was a snow day at the USPTO.

Tomorrow, Tuesday, January 26 will also be a snow day at the USPTO.

This means that any paper or response that needed to be filed at the USPTO on Monday, January 25 or Tuesday, January 26 will be timely if it is filed on Wednesday, January 27.

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Years later in litigation, who can recall when an Office was closed?

US practitioners have burned into their memory the débacle of December 22-27, 2015 when all of USPTO’s e-filing systems were broken.  For litigation purposes there will surely be cases where it will matter a lot whether a filing that got done on December 28, 2015 was or was not timely.  And any US practitioner will have no trouble remembering this very disruptive time.

But ten years from now in litigation, how will it be recalled that, for example, Monday, March 17, 2014 was a snow day at the USPTO?  (Maybe the litigants will think to check my blog article about that snow day.)

I am delighted to be able to report that for five years now, WIPO has been quietly maintaining a searchable historical database on exactly this topic.   You can go there and click on “US” and then click on “2014” and right there it lists March 17, 2014 as a day that the USPTO was closed.

This valuable resource from WIPO is the sort of database that you hope you will never need, but if you need it, it can be a lifesaver.

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For inbound foreign work, who’s the client?

A thoughtful reader (I’ll call him “WW”) asks:

I have an ethics-related question that should be relevant to most U.S. patent practitioners, though I haven’t been able to find any writings about it online.

The issue is, “who is the client”, for foreign-originated patent filings in the US?

The client could possibly be either the foreign originating firm, or it could be their own ultimate client, or possibly both.

To the extent we have a choice (for example, by specifying in an engagement letter signed by all parties), which would be better? I can see benefits and detriments to either choice.

I’ll offer one or two thoughts about this, and then I’d like to invite readers to please post comments with their own points of view about all of this. Continue reading “For inbound foreign work, who’s the client?”

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USPTO e-commerce systems continue to stumble

USPTO online systems continue to stumble or crash.  Much of this, I expect, is a consequence of cobbled-together temporary fixes to the massive UPS failures that happened on December 22.  Here’s a brief recap of today’s situation:

  • Newly filed patent applications and entries into the US national phase that were filed on January 5 seem to have been lost.  USPTO is trying to recover them but after more than a week they have not been recovered.  See further comments on this “January 5 problem” in a later blog post.
  • EFS-Web petitions that are supposed to be auto-granted are all broken.  We have a case that is scheduled to issue next Tuesday and we need to get it withdrawn from issue.  The auto-granting petition in EFS-Web keeps freezing and crashing.  EBC has acknowledged this as a known problem.  Hopefully USPTO will get this system repaired before next Tuesday.
  • Document display within TSDR has been on-again-off-again for the past couple of days.  As of right this moment it is on again.
  • ETAS sometimes crashes when you try to pay the recordation fee.  (EPAS does not have this problem because of course patent recordations are free of charge!)  There is a complicated workaround that involves saving the submission and taking off your shoes and putting them back on again.  (Just kidding.)
  • Visibility of recently filed documents in IFW is nonexistent.  Newly filed documents are supposed to be visible within one hour.  We are pretty consistently seeing delays of 18 hours or more before a document is visible in IFW.  This is a Big Problem.
  • EFS-Web ack receipts and fee payment pages are flaky.  This happened to many cases filed December 22 and December 27.  Even now as of January 14, USPTO has not yet provided accurate ack receipts and fee payment pages.  This is happening again now on new EFS-Web filings as of January 13.  The short-term survival steps for customers include checking the “fees” tab in PAIR and looking up the transaction in Financial Profile.
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USPTO site works best in modern web browsers?

Every fiftieth visit or so to the USPTO web site triggers a pop-up Customer Satisfaction Survey.   The survey asks things like “How likely are you to return to uspto.gov?” (question 16) and “Do you intend to contact the USPTO Customer Support Centers to get information that you couldn’t find on the USPTO website?”  (question 24.3)  I have encountered this survey many dozens of times in recent months.

Today the survey popped up again for me, and I filled it out.  The question that stuck in my mind the most today was this one:

The USPTO site works best in modern web browsers. Is there a barrier that prevents you from using the most up-to-date browsers?  (question 30)

The problem with this question is its false premise.  It’s just not true that the USPTO site works best in modern web browsers.  Here are two counterexamples:

  1. Private PAIR and EFS-Web don’t work in Chrome or Microsoft Edge.
  2. If you try to do a TEAS filing in Chrome, you will find that the editing buttons (buttons for italic and bold and indenting etc.) are missing.

USPTO ought to scrap the Entrust Java applet that it uses in PAIR and EFS-Web, as I blogged in May of 2014.

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USPTO does the right thing on trademark fees relating to the outage

On December 24 I blogged about things the USPTO needs to do to remediate the problems that flowed from the massive USPTO system outage December 22-27.  I wrote:

The TEAS-Plus system imposes a $50 per trademark class penalty on any filer of a “Plus” or “RF” (reduced fee) application who files a response by means other than e-filing.  USPTO needs to not impose that penalty on those who responded to a Plus or RF office action by means other than e-filing during this system crash time.

I am delighted to be able to report that now, December 31, the USPTO has addressed this problem.   Continue reading “USPTO does the right thing on trademark fees relating to the outage”