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There’s a curious temporary display in the atrium at the USPTO. Called “Walk through time”, it is a winding
path with large printed labels on the floor, portraying various events in the history of the USPTO. It starts with the founding of the patent office and proceeds through some sixty or so events to the present. 
My personal favorites are the 1887 event (the US joins the Paris Convention) and the 1970 event (the US joins the Patent Cooperation Treaty).
It’s fascinating to see the USPTO correcting its mistake in a recent acknowledgment of an incontestability claim in a trademark registration.
(See a followup article.)
Law Professor Rebecca Tushnet (Georgetown Law School) has a fascinating blog called Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log with a tagline of “False advertising and more”. If you haven’t subscribed to her blog, you should. One of her blog posts today is No dog in this fight: PTO makes a cancelled mark incontestable. The story told by this posting is by turns amusing, puzzling, and astonishing as one reads about the manner in which the USPTO handled the underlying trademark application and registration.
Will you be in San Diego at the time of the INTA annual meeting? If so, there are two receptions that you won’t want to miss.
Continue reading “The two receptions that you need to attend in San Diego in May”
Yes it’s another snow day at the Patent Office.
The weather reports for the Washington area call for “six to ten inches of snow” between now and noon on Tuesday. So the USPTO will be formally closed on Tuesday, February 17. This means that if you needed to file something on the 17th to satisfy some USPTO due date, it will be timely if filed on Wednesday the 18th.
Continue reading “USPTO will be closed on Tuesday, February 17”
Just a reminder that the USPTO will be closed on Monday, February 16. This is Washington’s Birthday* which is a federal holiday.
Anything that you might need to do by February 16 to satisfy some USPTO due date may be postponed until Tuesday, February 17 and will still be timely.
The USPTO fee reduction options that I blogged about here (December 17, 2014) and here (May 10, 2014) went into effect over the weekend. I invite you to start with the December 17 article if you are not already familiar with this development.
It’s a few months ago that I looked at one of our trademark cases — a Madrid Protocol case that had come in from foreign counsel on behalf of a foreign applicant — and pronounced to anyone who would listen that the case was never going to be approved for publication. I was convinced that the Examining Attorney’s grounds for refusal were impossible to overcome. I figured it was only a matter of time before it would go abandoned. I figured the sole remaining necessary lawyering skill would be communicating a gentle let-down to foreign counsel — an exercise in expectations management.
One of my associates was handling the case. The other day I was astonished to learn that my associate had completely overcome the refusal. I asked her how she accomplished this seemingly impossible result. She smiled and explained what had happened.
Continue reading “Clever associate’s trademark advocacy secret weapon revealed”
The arrival of a new year prompts every blogger to look back to see which postings in the previous year reached a lot of eyeballs.
Well, by far the most-read posting for all of 2014 in Ant-like Persistence was “A little-known USPTO initiative to reduce the backlog“. This posting, dating from early April of 2014, might be of great interest to patent practitioners who missed the original posting.
In second place was “USPTO is closed today, Monday, March 17“. This was the posting that told readers that it was a snow day in Washington. It meant that anything that needed to be filed in the USPTO on Monday March 17 could be postponed until Tuesday March 18 and still be timely.
The people who subscribe to this blog are likely to hear of such USPTO closings in the future. So if you have not already done so, subscribe to the blog. And if you have a friend or colleague who would like to hear about it when the USPTO has a snow day, encourage them to subscribe to the blog.