This blog post discusses two mistakes frequently made by users of Microsoft Outlook. Continue reading “Two mistakes frequently made by users of Microsoft Outlook”
USPTO still an SSL laggard
In August of 2014 I blogged that USPTO needed to implement SSL (“https://”) on all of its public-facing web sites. I also said that USPTO needed to implement PFS on all of its SSL-enabled web sites. (SSL and PFS are security features that protect visitors from eavesdropping by third parties around the Internet.) In that blog article I explained in detail why this is important. As just one of many examples of why this is important, the way things are now at the USPTO, third parties could eavesdrop and learn what search terms you are using when you search for a patent or a trademark registration.
Ten months have passed. It is now June of 2015 and USPTO has made no progress on this. None. Zip. Every USPTO web site that was vulnerable to this sort of eavesdropping in August of 2014 continues to be vulnerable today in June of 2015.
Now comes a directive from the White House saying the same thing now in June 2015 that I said in August of 2014. The directive tells all federal agencies that “all publicly accessible Federal websites and web services” must “only provide service through a secure connection” meaning https://. All agencies, including the USPTO, are required to get this done by December 31, 2016.
Let’s see how promptly the USPTO complies with this directive from the White House.
What’s the Best Practice for 92bis changes?
One of many nice things about the PCT (Patent Cooperation Treaty) system is that you can do one-stop shopping for changes in the bibliographic data. (In a somewhat similar way, the Madrid Protocol and Hague Agreement systems provide one-stop shopping for assignments and owner address changes.) By filing a so-called Rule 92bis request, you can update the inventor list, the name of the applicant, and/or addresses and citizenships thereof.
When I say “one-stop shopping” I mean that you do the change once and it covers multiple countries or Offices around the world.
But there are better and worse ways to carry out your 92bis request, and that’s the point of this blog posting.
Continue reading “What’s the Best Practice for 92bis changes?”
A reminder of an AIA trap for the unwary – “checking the box”
The America Invents Act took effect on September 16, 2012 and on March 16, 2013. Well over two years ago. So we don’t have to keep worrying about it nowadays, right?
Wrong, very wrong. We have to worry about it now even more than ever.
Here’s one example for the practitioner who is asked by foreign counsel to enter the US national phase from a PCT application. Continue reading “A reminder of an AIA trap for the unwary – “checking the box””
Register now for AIPLA PCT Seminar in July
You will recall that last February I told you to save the date for the Nineteenth Annual AIPLA Patent Cooperation Treaty Seminars. Registration is now open for the Seminars:
- July 20 and 21 (Monday and Tuesday) in San Francisco
- July 23 and 24 (Thursday and Friday) in Alexandria, Virginia
The AIPLA PCT Seminars are the best way to learn about the PCT and to bring yourself up to date about recent changes and developments in the PCT.
Registration for the Seminar also entitles you to attend a webinar, at no additional charge, on July 14. The webinar is a PCT primer, providing an overview of the PCT system and the basics of filing a PCT application.
Continue reading “Register now for AIPLA PCT Seminar in July”
DNSSEC incompetence at GoDaddy
DNSSEC is an important protocol by which DNS zone records are cryptographically signed. The protocol permits an internet user to be confident that a particular web site is what it purports to be rather than a fake or substitute web site created by an intermeddler or wrongdoer. The protocol also offers many other benefits too numerous to discuss here in detail.
I use GoDaddy for hosting of this blog and I use GoDaddy to provide DNSSEC protection for the blog. Unfortunately GoDaddy has implemented DNSSEC in a way that does not work well with the way that it provides blog hosting. This has led to three intervals in the past year during which the DNSSEC protection did not work for the domain blog.oppedahl.com. The result has been that some visitors (those whose connection to the Internet is sophisticated enough to make use of the protection offered by DNSSEC) have been unable to visit the blog web site during those intervals.
In technical terms, what GoDaddy has screwed up during those three intervals is that it has stopped providing DS records for blog.oppedahl.com in the oppedahl.com zone file.
It is a big disappointment that GoDaddy did not fix the bug in its implementation of DNSSEC after the first failure, which was about a year ago. When that first failure happened a year ago, it looks as though GoDaddy fixed the problem manually, by manually re-inserting the all-important DS records into the zone file. But did not correct the underlying problem, which is that GoDaddy’s DNS setup for blog.oppedahl.com is fragile and breaks at the slightest provocation, like changing some other record in the zone file.
Then around eight months ago some change that should have been harmless led once again to GoDaddy failing to provide DS records for blog.oppedahl.com in the oppedabl.com zone file. GoDaddy eventually got the DS records back into place, but again apparently only due to some manual update. GoDaddy’s mistakes in implementing DNSSEC generally remained uncorrected.
Three days ago the fragility of GoDaddy’s implementation of DNSSEC revealed itself again, because once again GoDaddy stopped providing DS records for blog.oppedahl.com. What’s frustrating with GoDaddy is that when I try to explain the problem (the blog.oppedahl.com subdomain lacks any DS records), the response from the GoDaddy tech support person is the telephone equivalent of a deer in the headlights.
The image above, from VeriSign’s DNS Analyzer, shows that GoDaddy is to blame.
Anyway after something like the fourth call to GoDaddy tech support in three days, I finally reached someone who understood the problem. And supposedly GoDaddy’s “advanced tech support” will now manually re-insert the missing DS records into the zone file.
Of course what needs to happen is that GoDaddy needs to correct its implementation of DNSSEC so that it handles subdomains (such as blog.oppedahl.com) reliably rather than in a fragile way.
So anyway if you have been unable to reach this blog during the past three days, that’s why.
Sometimes the USPTO gets it right
What happens so often is that the USPTO gets things wrong about the PCT process. For example the USPTO seems so often to go out of its way to avoid giving any credit, let alone full faith and credit, to the work done by the International Searching Authority when it searches and examines a patent application. So here is a refreshing example of the USPTO getting it right.
Where to send a USPTO patent petition?
In the old days (meaning, before e-filing at the USPTO became possible), the practitioner who was filing a petition would simply drop the petition in the mail, directed to the USPTO generally. Someone in the USPTO mail room would look at each petition, and would pick where exactly within the USPTO to direct the petition so that it might be considered and decided.
Then the Internet happened and a decade later, the USPTO reacted to the Internet by setting up EFS-Web. In EFS-Web the burden of figuring out where exactly within USPTO a patent-related petition would be directed got shifted away from USPTO mail room personnel and onto the e-filer. The choices from which the patent e-filer might pick include:
-
- Petition for review by the Office of Petitions
- Petition for review by the PCT legal office
- Petition for review by the Technology Center SPRE
When you are e-filing a petition, how should you pick where to send your petition?
I just learned about another IP blog …
It’s been around for some time, but I only learned about it the other day … the Brandaide blog. A blog that is all about creating, building, and protecting your brand.
A new category of walking-corpse US patents?
(Update: USPTO is doing a very customer-friendly thing about this, as I report here.)
One of the scariest things for a US patent practitioner is the thought of being held responsible for a patent that turns out to have been a “walking corpse”. A patent that everybody thought was a normal patent and it turns out that there is some defect that means it was never actually a patent at all.
My favorite category of “walking-corpse” patent had, until now, been the patent that was granted on a patent application in which the applicant made a non-publication request, and then did foreign filing, and failed to timely rescind the non-publication request. The rules say that such a patent application is deemed abandoned some 46 days after the foreign filing happened. But probably nobody involved at the time knew that the status of the application was “abandoned”. Not the Examiner, not the USPTO employee who cheerfully collected the Issue Fee and mailed out the ribbon copy of the granted patent. Least of all the practitioner who forgot about rescinding the non-pub request and who triumphantly handed the ribbon copy of the patent to the client. Likely as not, the first time this defect would get noticed is at litigation time.
Anyway until now that was my favorite example of a “walking corpse” US patent. But it looks like maybe there’s now a new category of walking-corpse US patents. Continue reading “A new category of walking-corpse US patents?”