Category: Trademarks

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USPTO needs to implement SSL and PFS on all servers

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.

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Trademark Office being helpful

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.

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Fresh air from the Trademark Office

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.

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What USPTO should do — make patent assignments viewable

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.

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A blog with a name – “Ant-like Persistence”

About two months ago I launched this blog.  It took me a while, but now I have picked a name for the blog.  The alert reader will recall Learned Hand’s (perhaps backhanded) compliment to patent practitioners, citing their “ant-like persistence” (Lyon v. Boh, 1 F.2d 48, 50 (S.D.N.Y.1924).  With a nod to those patent practitioners who at the start of the twentieth century exhibited the ant-like persistence that inspired Learned Hand to write this colorful phrase, I hereby dub this the “Ant-like Persistence” blog.