Posts

Posted on

Design Day 2015 at the USPTO

Today was Design Day 2015 at the USPTO.  From humble beginnings many years ago, Design Day has grown to an enormous all-day event, filling both halves of the USPTO auditorium and overflowing to computer screens in streamed offsite locations.

The in-person attendees numbered some 320, of which about one hundred were examiners in Technology Center 2900 (examiners who examine design patent applications).

These days of course at any design patent event, one faces the spectacle of the many, many patent practitioners who used to pooh-pooh design patents as a waste of time and who now will proclaim (with no apparent embarrassment) to anyone who will listen how much design expertise they say they have accumulated over the years.  As I mingled with the attendees during the break times in tsaidmanhis all-day meeting, I was reminded that there are a small handful of practitioners (Perry Saidman comes to mind, but there are others) who were voices in the wilderness, years ago, getting design patents for clients long before it was trendy and fashionable to do so.

It was nice to have an opportunity to chat with the design patent examiners, and to learn a bit about what their daily work is like.

Posted on

“Walk through time” at the USPTO

There’s a curious temporary display in the atrium at the USPTO.  Called “Walk through time”, it is a windingparis path with large printed labels on the floor, portraying various events in the history of the USPTO.  It starts with the founding of the patent office and proceeds through some sixty or so events to the present.  pct

My personal favorites are the 1887 event (the US joins the Paris Convention) and the 1970 event (the US joins the Patent Cooperation Treaty).

 

Posted on

Picking a media stick for road warrior use just got easier

We’re all familiar with media-sticksmedia sticks such as the Amazon Fire TV Stick (left) and the Roku Stick (right) and the Google Chromecast (not shown).  You plug the stick into a spare HDMI port on your television, explain to the stick how to connect to your wifi, and sit back and watch any of a range of “over-the-top” programming.  This “over-the-top” programming, by the way, is going to change everything for those entertainment providers (DirecTV, Dish, Comcast cable TV, Time-Warner cable TV) that traditionally made big profits by forcing you to buy expensive bundles of channels just to get the one or two channels that you actually wanted.  But the new world of “over-the-top” programming will be the subject of a later posting.  For now, the important thing is that one of these media sticks just got better, and is now the ideal media stick for the road warrior who wants to watch the occasional movie-on-demand or television-episode-on-demand while on the road in a hotel.

The big problem, until today, with all of these media sticks was that they won’t work worth a darn in a hotel.  The hotel wifi nearly always has a “terms and conditions” screen that you must view and click on to gain access to the hotel’s wifi.  Or requires that you enter your room number and name as part of gaining access.  And the media sticks lacked any way to do this.

The media sticks are programmed to update themselves with the maker’s latest firmware.  And today’s firmware update for one of these media sticks gave it the ability to connect in a hotel.  Which media stick, you might wonder, am I talking about?

Continue reading “Picking a media stick for road warrior use just got easier”

Posted on

An excellent blog that you should subscribe to

(See a followup article.)

Law Professor Rebecca Tushnet (Georgetown Law School) has a fascinating blog called Rebecca Tushnet’s 43(B)log with a tagline of “False advertising and more”.  If you haven’t subscribed to her blog, you should.  One of her blog posts today is No dog in this fight: PTO makes a cancelled mark incontestable.  The story told by this posting is by turns amusing, puzzling, and astonishing as one reads about the manner in which the USPTO handled the underlying trademark application and registration.

Posted on

Newly created design art unit now has a predicted First Office Action date

Recall that recently, as part of dissolving the “ghost art unit”, the USPTO created a new art unit 2919 headed by an Eric Goodman.  Now for the first time, this new art unit 2919 has a publicly stated First Office Action Prediction.  Cases in art unit 2919 that were filed two months ago have an FOAP of 18 months.

This compares favorably with art unit 2913 which has FOAPs in the range of 32 months.

Posted on

Hague rules published

President Obama signed the act enabling the US to join the Hague Agreement on December 18, 2012.  Would-be users of the Hague Agreement have thus been waiting for more than two years for the Final Rules implementing the Hague Agreement.  Today the USPTO published the Final Rules.

In coming days and weeks I will post comments and observations about the new Rules.  If you’ve not already done so, I invite you to subscribe to this blog so that you will see the comments and observations.

Posted on

Six-month-old PPH petition granted — coincidence?

Saturday, March 21, 2015 is the day that I blogged about a PPH petition that had been outstanding in the Office of Petitions since September 12, 2014.  I don’t know if it is sheer coincidence … but the Office of Petitions considered the petition on Monday, March 23 (and granted it).

So as of now our oldest not-yet-ruled-upon PPH petitions were filed November 5 and November 13.  This is still an unreasonable delay within the Office of Petitions, but not as bad as the six-month-plus delay in the case that just got its petition granted.