Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
Back in August of 2014 I blogged about the urgent need for USPTO to use “https://” instead of “https://” in all of its servers. In June of 2015 I noted that USPTO had made no progress on this, so I blogged about it again. I am delighted to be able to report that USPTO has now made a baby step. On August 11, 2016, USPTO made an announcement about this.
Continue reading “USPTO makes a little progress on web server security”
It will be recalled that USPTO had a massive systems crash on December 22, 2015 which shut down every one of USPTO’s external-facing e-commerce systems, including the EFS-Web system for filing of patent applications and the TEAS system for filing of trademark applications.
On December 23, 2015 USPTO purported to “deem” December 22 and 23 to be holidays. The next day, I pointed out (see blog article) that USPTO probably lacked the power to do this. I said that the USPTO needed to head over to Capitol Hill to get a special bill passed which would cause December 22 and 23, 2015 to be real holidays (for purposes of the USPTO).
It was, of course, only a matter of time before the USPTO’s power to “deem” a day to be a federal holiday in the District of Columbia would be tested in litigation. And now that day has come. Continue reading “USPTO failed to go to Capitol Hill about the massive system crash”
When you get ready to file an international design application (a “Hague application”) you have no choice but to try to figure out what to do about drawings, with the goal of (hopefully) satisfying the requirements of each Office that you are planning to designate.
In the early days of Hague, most Offices that belonged to Hague were “registration” Offices, meaning that they checked formalities but did not do much in the way of substantive examination. But in recent times more and more Offices that have recently joined are Offices that do carry out some amount of substantive examination. Perhaps the Office in which an applicant would be most likely to run into trouble would be the USPTO.
And indeed it is true that some Hague applications that designate the US have been running into problems because of the drawings.
WIPO, together with various of the designated Offices, have developed guidelines for applicants. You can see the guidelines here.
These guidelines should be studied by any applicant that is planning to designate Hungary, Japan, Kyrgystan, South Korea, Moldova, Romania, Syria, or the US.
Keep in mind that for a US applicant, one option offered by the Hague Agreement is that the US applicant could designate the US. (I call this a “hairpin turn”.) Such a US applicant should likewise study these guidelines.
As you may see here, I will be teaching some classes about the Patent Cooperation Treaty in the next few months. These include:
I teach advanced patent prosecution as an adjunct professor at the University of Denver. I hear from my students what it costs these days to buy a casebook for a class. Some cost $150. Some cost $200. So I am delighted to see that there is some movement in the direction of reducing this cost for the student. It comes from publishing-on-demand services such as Createspace and Lulu, as I will describe. Continue reading “The end of expensive law school casebooks?”
I’ll share my notion of the Best Practice for recordation of US patent assignments. Please post comments below. Continue reading “Best practice for recording US patent assignments”
The Office of Patent Application Processing could be nicer to applicants. Were OPAP to do so, this would promote science and the useful arts. Continue reading “How about six little check boxes?”
On September 26 and 27 (a Monday and a Tuesday), WIPO will conduct an advanced seminar on the Patent Cooperation Treaty. To register and to find out more, click here. Here is WIPO’s description of the seminar:
This PCT seminar is targeted towards patent administrators, paralegals and other users who are already familiar with the PCT System. This is a unique opportunity to learn more about the procedural details of the PCT system and some of the best filing and practice strategies, directly from PCT experts of the International Bureau of WIPO. Prior completion of the introductory PCT distance learning course is highly recommended.
The twentieth annual AIPLA PCT Seminar will take place July 25 and 26 (Monday and Tuesday) in Alexandria, Virginia. It’s time to sign up if you have not already signed up.
This Seminar is different from other PCT programs in that it has not only official patent office presenters but also practitioners. Among the presenters are a speaker from China and a speaker from Europe, and they will talk about how to draft a PCT patent application with China and Europe in mind. They will also talk about the process of entry into the Chinese national phase and European regional phase.
Yours truly is among the presenters.
To register, or to find out more, click here.
Those trademark practitioners whose clients include companies located outside of the US will be familiar with the so-called Section 44e filing basis. This is the filing basis that honors Article 6quinquies of the Paris Convention. It permits a would-be applicant in the USPTO to get a free pass (for six years) on having to prove use in commerce in the US. To qualify for this filing basis, and thus to get the six-year free pass, the applicant must establish that the same applicant earlier obtained a non-US trademark registration for the same mark. The goods/services identified in the registration are required to “cover” the goods/services identified in the US application. A further requirement is that the registration is required to come from the place that is the “country of origin” for the applicant. Finally, the registration needs to be valid and subsisting, and needs to have an expiration date far enough in the future to make it likely the US prosecution would reach is conclusion prior to the expiration date.
The problem is that the TEAS forms for such a US trademark application are actively unfriendly to many applicants, namely those applicants for which the office of registration provides cryptographically protected certificates of registration. I’ll explain. Continue reading “A way to make a TEAS form friendlier”