The USPTO’s proposed trademark fee decrease that I blogged about on May 10, 2014 (“Fresh Air from the Trademark Office“) is now a sure thing. It takes effect on January 17, 2015. You can read the Federal Register notice dated December 16, 2014. (Or you can read the rest of this blog post!) Continue reading “USPTO trademark fees to drop on January 17”
Replacing the bulbs in your car tail lights with LEDs
Recently I went through the process of replacing most of the incandescent bulbs in my car with LEDs. Why did I do this? Mostly because it reduces the risk of someone tail-ending my car. 
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Picking a wifi hot spot – 5 GHz band
If you are a frequent traveler you know that it is a life-changing event to start carrying a wifi hot spot with you. I count it as a necessity. I have had a dozen mobile data devices over the past fifteen years or so. Years ago the way to connect was by means of a plug-in card in your notebook computer. Nowadays the smart way to go is a wifi hot spot. The hot spot provides wifi for your notebook computer, for your tablet, for your smart phone, and if you are traveling with co-workers, it provides wifi for your co-workers’ devices as well.
Many hotels gouge their guests with charges of $10 or even $15 or $20 per night for internet service. Some of them charge this fee a second or third time per night for your second or third device. 
Even in a hotel that (nicely) does not charge for the wifi you can occasionally have a bad night that the hotel’s wifi is not working well or at all.
When you are in an airport, you may find that the “free” wifi in the airport is very slow, or only works for so many minutes and then they expect you to pay to keep using it.
The monthly fee that you pay for a wifi hot spot can pay for itself during just a single out-of-town trip.
A wifi hot spot can make an intercity train ride much more productive.
If you do international travel, as I often do, the usual worry with international data usage is the fear that you could return to the US and receive a bill for thousands of dollars. The way to avoid this risk is to use prepaid international data such as AT&T’s Buyasession program, loaded into a wifi hot spot, and then configure your smart phone and notebook computer and tablet to draw their data only from wifi and not from the local phone company.
The point of this blog posting is to tell you about a particular wifi hot spot that has served me well lately, and that has a particular feature that I have not seen in other wifi hot spots.
Adopting a digital wallet
(Here is a follow-on article.)
I finally decided to try out a digital wallet system. By this we mean a system that uses an NFC (near field communications) radio link to pay at a store. You can recognize which stores are equipped for NFC payments by looking for this logo (right).
Of course the digital wallet system that is all over the media lately is Apple Pay, which works only with certain very recently released models of iPhones.
It turns out that Apple Pay is the johnny-come-lately to the NFC party. Other companies have been offering NFC payment systems (digital wallets) for over a year now. These systems that have been around for over a year do not require you to have an iPhone.
USPTO’s backlog of undecided PPH petition worsens
(Follow-up postings are here and here and here.)
Last month I blogged about USPTO’s backlog of undecided PPH petitions. These are the petitions in cases where the applicant is asking the USPTO to place a patent application on the Patent Prosecution Highway because the application has already been found patentable in some other patent office.
USPTO’s internal standard is to rule upon such a petition within two months of when it was filed. When I blogged about this last month, we had petitions filed as long ago as August 26, 2014 that had not yet been decided. By now we have over a dozen PPH petitions that were filed more than three months ago and remain outstanding as of today. The August 26 petition remains outstanding. The backlog is worsening.
How old is your oldest PPH petition that has not yet been decided?
Getting out of the ghost art unit at the USPTO
Well, one of our oldest design patent applications, one that had been parked in the “ghost art unit” for some seven months, is now out of the ghost art unit. Just today it got transferred to art unit 2911, and after some seven months without a First Office Action Prediction (“FOAP”), it again has an FOAP.
The FOAP is six months, that is, USPTO now estimates that it will examine this case in about June of 2015.
USPTO’s First Office Action Estimator says that for a newly filed application in art unit 2911, the estimated time for a newly filed design patent application to get a first office action is 13 months from now.
What’s weird about this is that our application was filed September 23, 2013. With a backlog of 13 months, this would suggest our application should have been examined in about October of 2013. Over a month ago. Our seven months in the ghost art unit seem to have pushed this application back in the queue so that it will get examined much later than it should have.
Well you take what you can get. At least this application is now back in the normal Examining Corps and after some seven months of being unable to do so, we can once again track its progress through the system.
We have over a dozen other design patent applications that were filed more recently than this one, that are still parked in the ghost art unit. We will continue to keep an eye on them and hopefully they too will eventually be transferred to a real art unit.
Countries with foreign-filing-license requirements
US filers are very familiar with the requirement that if an invention is made in the US, the applicant may only file a patent application on that invention in a non-US country if the applicant has obtained an FFL (foreign filing license) from the USPTO.
From time to time the question will arise what if the invention is jointly made by people in some country outside the US and people in the US? Each country has laws about where you can file first and what you must do before you can file elsewhere.
The nice folks at WIPO have developed a handy web page that summarizes FFL requirements around the world.
This web page at WIPO’s web site does not, of course, give legal advice as to how to deal with complicated problems where some of the inventors are in one country and some of the inventors are in a different country. I can describe some of the approaches that some practitioners use to try to solve these problems.
Continue reading “Countries with foreign-filing-license requirements”
ISA/KR goes TMU
Those who have heard me lecture about the Patent Cooperation Treaty are familiar with my tag line “trendy, modern, and up-to-date” (TMU). The idea of course is that we all surely do want to be TMU when serving clients. Using ePCT for example to administer our PCT applications. Well, I am delighted to report that the Korean patent office, in its role as an International Searching Authority, is moving in the direction of being trendy, modern, and up-to-date. How so, you may ask?
USPTO credit card limit to be cut back still further
We get a lot of frequent flyer miles every year paying fees to the USPTO and WIPO by credit card. The miles that we get are chicken feed compared with the frequent flyer miles that the really big filers — the Oblons and Sughrues of the world — may receive in this way.
Paying a fee by credit card offers the further benefit that we can “float” the cost for a month, and hopefully the client’s payment of its bill will happen promptly enough that we can pay the credit card bill in full using the money that just came in from the client.
Having said this, we note that the USPTO keeps tinkering with its credit-card payment system in ways that make it harder and harder to pay by credit card. Just today USPTO announced another change.
Continue reading “USPTO credit card limit to be cut back still further”
Utility art units with the smallest backlogs
In my previous post about published USPTO statistics for utility art units, I promised another blog post listing the utility art units with the smallest backlogs. Here they are:
Continue reading “Utility art units with the smallest backlogs”