Category: Trademarks

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The importance of warning clients about unscrupulous fee requests

We all need to redouble our efforts to warn clients about unscrupulous fee requests.  Four recent examples reminded me how insidious these fee requests can be.  The first one asks me to wire $2322.30 to a bank in Slovakia.  The second one asks me to wire $2738 to a bank in Czech Republic.  The third one asks me to wire $2548.25 (where do they get these amounts?) to a bank in Slovakia.  And the fourth asks me to wire $2327 to a bank in Czech Republic.

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USPTO will be closed Friday, December 26

The USPTO will be closed Friday, December 26, 2014.  Any action or fee due on Friday, December 26, 2014, would be considered timely if filed on the next succeeding business day, specifically, Monday, December 29, 2014.  You can see this on the USPTO web site here and here.

A big thank you goes to Bryan Wheelock and Matthew Hintz who provided the citations to the items on the USPTO web site.

Yet another nice person (Scott Barrett) points out that apparently this closure was announced by the White House on December 5, 2014.

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A tip of the hat to the TTABlog

Yesterday I was delighted to see that John L. Welch had given a shout-out onClipboard02 his very popular TTABlog to an article in my Ant-like Persistence blog.  This was in his TTABlog Flotsam and Jetsam, Issue No. 15.  If you’ve not already done so, you should subscribe to the TTABlog.  John was doing blogging before it was trendy, for over a decade now, and his blog has probably at least ten times as many followers as mine has.  So it’s very nice and very gracious for him to have linked to my blog.  I estimate that his link brought at least a hundred new viewers to my blog.

On the subject of intellectual property blogs, there are other important blogs that you should subscribe to.  These include the many sponsors of Meet the Bloggers, a moveable feast that has turned up at INTA meetings since the San Diego meeting in 2005.  John has sponsored Meet the Bloggers many times, as have:

I’d guess there will likely be an eleventh annual Meet the Bloggers reception at the INTA meeting in San Diego in 2015.

And of course if you have not already done so, you should subscribe to Dennis Crouch’s Patently-O Blog.

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The ® symbol

The alert reader will have already noticed today’s change to the banner above.  The banner now contains the ® symbol next to the words “Ant-like Persistence”.  The banner also contains a photograph (taken by yours truly) that shows some of the mountains nearby to our office in Summit County, Colorado.

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USPTO credit card limit to be cut back still further

We get a lot of frequent flyer miles every year paying fees to the USPTO and WIPO by credit card.  The miles that we get are chicken feed compared with the frequent flyer miles that the really big filers — the Oblons and Sughrues of the world — may receive in this way.

Paying a fee by credit card offers the further benefit that we can “float” the cost for a month, and hopefully the client’s payment of its bill will happen promptly enough that we can pay the credit card bill in full using the money that just came in from the client.

Having said this, we note that the USPTO keeps tinkering with its credit-card payment system in ways that make it harder and harder to pay by credit card.  Just today USPTO announced another change.

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New USPTO “series code” for Hague Agreement cases

Those whose practice includes “inbound” Madrid Protocol trademark applications are accustomed to the series code “79”.  When you see a USPTO application number that starts with “79” you know that it is a trademark application number and that it came to the USPTO from the International Bureau of WIPO.  Someone who filed a Madrid Protocol trademark application (in a place other than the USPTO) must have designated the US.

Now the USPTO has picked the series code that it will use for Hague Agreement applications.

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Canada takes a step toward Hague and PLT

The Canadian parliament has taken up a bill which, if enacted, would permit Canada to join the Hague Agreement (one-stop filing of applications for protection of industrial designs) and the Patent Law Treaty.

There has also been some progress in Canada toward eventually joining the Madrid Protocol (one-stop filing of applications for protection of trademarks).