The USPTO fee reduction options that I blogged about here (December 17, 2014) and here (May 10, 2014) went into effect over the weekend. I invite you to start with the December 17 article if you are not already familiar with this development.
Free live audio program on design patent enforcement issues
Design patents are suddenly important — everybody gets that by now. There are a handful of practitioners who were active in the design patent area long before design patents became fashionable, and Chris Carani is one of that handful. This next Wednesday Chris will host a free of charge live audio program that you can and should attend if your schedule permits.
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Some of the firms that have not yet submitted their design patent numbers
About 23,000 US design patents issued last year. The firms that have thus far responded to be listed in the Design Patent Tote Board between them filed about 2300 design patents, or about ten percent of that total.
So as may be seen, there are still quite a few patent firms that have not yet reported their design patent totals. Here are some of the well-known patent firms that have not yet reported their design patent totals:
- Cantor Colburn
- Foley & Lardner
- Morgan Lewis
- Birch Stewart
- Sterne Kessler
- Kilpatrick
- Nixon Vanderhye
- Crowell & Moring
- Rader Fishman
- Westerman Hattori
- Finnegan Henderson
- Christensen O’Connor
- Harness Dickey
- Ladas & Parry
- Wolf Greenfield
- Leydig Voit
- Oblon Spivak
- Sheridan Ross
- McAndrews Held & Malloy
If you know somebody at one of these firms, I’d be grateful if you can pass along to them a link to this blog post, so that they can complete and submit the questionnaire. Submissions will close January 31 and the tote board will be published in February of 2015.
Urging USPTO to “drink its own Champagne”
(There is a followup posting.)
Let’s say you filed a PCT application and picked the USPTO to be your International Searching Authority. Suppose further that ISA/US decided the claims are patentable. When you enter the US national phase from that PCT application, may you safely assume that the USPTO will allow the application?
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Clever associate’s trademark advocacy secret weapon revealed
It’s a few months ago that I looked at one of our trademark cases — a Madrid Protocol case that had come in from foreign counsel on behalf of a foreign applicant — and pronounced to anyone who would listen that the case was never going to be approved for publication. I was convinced that the Examining Attorney’s grounds for refusal were impossible to overcome. I figured it was only a matter of time before it would go abandoned. I figured the sole remaining necessary lawyering skill would be communicating a gentle let-down to foreign counsel — an exercise in expectations management.
One of my associates was handling the case. The other day I was astonished to learn that my associate had completely overcome the refusal. I asked her how she accomplished this seemingly impossible result. She smiled and explained what had happened.
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CLE opportunity in Michigan on March 16
Last year the Intellectual Property Law Section of the State Bar of Michigan invited me to speak at their Spring Seminar 2014 in East Lansing, Michigan. It was a delightful event, well organized and well attended. From the point of view of a speaker, what’s nice is when an audience has lots of good questions. This was such an audience. I am delighted that they have invited me back to speak at this year’s Spring Seminar 2015.
You can see the program and brochure. It will be Monday, March 16, again in East Lansing. Fellow intellectual property bloggers Martin Schwimmer (The Trademark Blog) and Eugene Quinn (IPWatchdog) will also be presenting, each of them in a plenary session.
Video Documentary “Inventing to Nowhere”
If you have not already seen it, you might want to look at the video documentary “Inventing to Nowhere”. It talks about the importance of the patent system. It is quite well done.
Most-read postings in “Ant-like Persistence” for 2014
The arrival of a new year prompts every blogger to look back to see which postings in the previous year reached a lot of eyeballs.
Well, by far the most-read posting for all of 2014 in Ant-like Persistence was “A little-known USPTO initiative to reduce the backlog“. This posting, dating from early April of 2014, might be of great interest to patent practitioners who missed the original posting.
In second place was “USPTO is closed today, Monday, March 17“. This was the posting that told readers that it was a snow day in Washington. It meant that anything that needed to be filed in the USPTO on Monday March 17 could be postponed until Tuesday March 18 and still be timely.
The people who subscribe to this blog are likely to hear of such USPTO closings in the future. So if you have not already done so, subscribe to the blog. And if you have a friend or colleague who would like to hear about it when the USPTO has a snow day, encourage them to subscribe to the blog.
29 days remaining to submit your design patent count for 2014
As you will recall from this posting, I will be publishing a report in February of 2015 listing patent firms and the numbers of US design patents they obtained for clients in 2014. In that posting I invited each firm to submit its count of US design patents obtained in 2014 (and 2013, and 2012). As of right now, five patent firms have responded. Between them, those five firms obtained 418 US design patents in 2014, 443 US design patents in 2013, and 432 US design patents in 2012.
There are 29 days left for submissions. There are perhaps a hundred or so patent firms that did significant numbers of US design patent filings that issued in 2014, meaning that there are perhaps 95 or so submissions still to come. If you are with a firm that obtained US design patents for clients in 2014, I encourage you to read the original posting to see an easy way to do the database search to count your US design patent grants, and to send in your submission.
And if you know someone who is with a firm that obtained US design patents for clients in 2014, I encourage you to pass this posting along to that person so that they will know about the opportunity to respond.
The importance of warning clients about unscrupulous fee requests
We all need to redouble our efforts to warn clients about unscrupulous fee requests. Four recent examples reminded me how insidious these fee requests can be. The first one asks me to wire $2322.30 to a bank in Slovakia. The second one asks me to wire $2738 to a bank in Czech Republic. The third one asks me to wire $2548.25 (where do they get these amounts?) to a bank in Slovakia. And the fourth asks me to wire $2327 to a bank in Czech Republic.
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