Well, the Trademark Office at the USPTO has done another customer-friendly thing. It has announced a plan to provide reminders to holders of US trademark registrations of the need for renewals.
Continue reading “The Trademark Office doing another nice thing”
There are a lot of annoying things about an email that says “see attached letter”. I’ll basically just be ranting in this posting. Feel free to skip it.
I should emphasize first that if somebody is paying my firm to do work, I will cheerfully receive any and all “attached letters” that they wish to send. The non-US patent firm that has sent me dozens of patent applications to be filed in the US can send any email in whatever way they want to sent it.
What I am talking about is the non-US intellectual property firms, and the service providers (annuity services for example) that are receiving money from my firm. These are the people I am complaining about when I say I am annoyed by an email that says “see attached letter”.
Why am I annoyed by this?
As a reminder, any TEAS form that needs e-signing will get thrown away at the USPTO tonight. USPTO has scheduled a server reboot for tomorrow (Saturday the 23rd) in which all of the outstanding TEAS forms will get thrown away.
So the smart thing to do today is to chase after your clients and get your outstanding TEAS forms e-signed today. (And you need to get the forms e-filed right away after they have been e-signed.) Otherwise if the form remains unsigned and unfiled by the end of the day, you will have to start over again on Monday.
I guess the other smart thing to do today, if you have not already done so, is to subscribe to this blog! ☺ Just go to the upper-right corner where it says “Subscribe to blog via email”.
(Followup — USPTO did the right thing and stopped publishing IP addresses. See this blog post.)
Those who read the previous posting, about the need for USPTO to implement SSL and PFS on all of its outward-facing e-commerce systems, will have heard of the suspicion that a company is eavesdropping on TESS sessions and then uses the results of the eavesdropping in emailed sales pitches. The alert reader will wonder how it is that such an eavesdropper would be able to figure out what email address to use to reach someone at an otherwise seemingly random IP address. The answer is that the US Trademark Office needs to stop publishing IP addresses linked to email addresses.
The USPTO needs to implement SSL and PFS on all of its public-facing servers. In plain language all of the servers at USPTO need to use “https://” rather than “https://”. Why? Because apparently there are eavesdroppers. See this report from a member of the E-Trademarks listserv:
The company TMFeatures really has figured out how to decipher what we are searching, and I am very concerned. I am working on a very sensitive global launch for a client, and I received an email this afternoon from this company which makes it clear that it knows exactly what I have pulled up on the public USPTO TESS database. How can that happen? If a company is able to compile a list of the marks we have pulled up, it would not be hard to make a very good case of competitive intelligence available for the right price. I assume this would be much worse for single industry in-house trademark counsel than us outside people, but still very concerning.
Continue reading “USPTO needs to implement SSL and PFS on all servers”
Do you sometimes prepare a submission in USPTO’s TEAS system, and send it to a client so that the client may review it and maybe e-sign it? (Examples of such a submission might include the filing of a new US trademark application or the filing of a Statement of Use.) If so, then during the next two weeks you may wish to carry out that task in a slightly different way than the usual way. The nice thing is that the Trademark Office is being helpful to its customers by letting them know in advance of something important that will happen about two weeks from now.
It is all too easy for an intellectual property practitioner in the US to fall into the bad habit of assuming that everything about IP is the same in every state of the US. The other day a discussion in the E-Trademarks listserv offered a reminder of a particularly nasty trap for the unwary — the terrifying New York definition of a franchise.
Continue reading “The Terrifying New York Definition of a Franchise”
The other day I encountered a new “feature” of EPAS and ETAS. 
You can see it in this screen shot:
Apparently the USPTO wants to make it possible for the filer to somehow influence the physical sequence in which recordations appear in the Abstract of Title.
As far as I can see this is not a good thing for USPTO to do.
It’s easy to gripe when the USPTO does something, or proposes to do something, that makes it harder to get a patent or harder to register a trademark. But it’s only fair to recognize those times when USPTO gets things right by making something easier or better. As a recent example, the USPTO got it right when it relaxed certain requirements for getting a patent application onto Track I. And the USPTO got it right when it relaxed rules for CPAs in design patent applications. Now USPTO has proposed rules which would make it easier (and cheaper) to get and renew a trademark registration.
USPTO, in response to pressure from the White House and from big companies that are recipients of cease-and-desist letters, recently published proposed rules with a stated goal of promoting transparency in ownership of patents. There are many things wrong (blog) with the proposed rules. But there is a simple thing that the USPTO could do to promote transparency in ownership of patents that would not require rulemaking at all — make patent assignments viewable.
Continue reading “What USPTO should do — make patent assignments viewable”
