Whenever you generate a Federal Express shipping label, you reach a place where you have to pick which service you want. In general you would expect that the faster service costs more than that slower service. But no!
PPH petition backlog — four months and counting
(Followup posting here.)
USPTO’s internal standard for attending to PPH petitions is two months. Well over four months have passed since the last time we saw the USPTO decide a PPH petition. Our oldest PPH that stands unattended-to by the USPTO was filed August 26, 2014, a full four months ago now.
Continue reading “PPH petition backlog — four months and counting”
USPTO will be closed Friday, December 26
The USPTO will be closed Friday, December 26, 2014. Any action or fee due on Friday, December 26, 2014, would be considered timely if filed on the next succeeding business day, specifically, Monday, December 29, 2014. You can see this on the USPTO web site here and here.
A big thank you goes to Bryan Wheelock and Matthew Hintz who provided the citations to the items on the USPTO web site.
Yet another nice person (Scott Barrett) points out that apparently this closure was announced by the White House on December 5, 2014.
Ghost art unit apparently disbanded
On November 19 I blogged about the “Ghost Art Unit” at the USPTO. This was art unit 2910, headed by SPEs Cathron Brooks and Joel Sincavage. This was a curious art unit with no Examiners. Our firm had some fifteen design patent applications stalled in this art unit. The cases had no First Office Action Prediction, which was no surprise given that the art unit had no Examiners. A comment by a USPTO person gave me the impression that a couple of thousand design patent applications, all GUI (graphical user interface) applications, were assigned to this art unit. Continue reading “Ghost art unit apparently disbanded”
Registering a sound mark
USPTO’s grant this week of a trademark registration for Ant-like Persistence reminds me of the trademark registration which we received a couple of years ago for a sound mark. Long-time members of the E-Trademarks listserv will recall this grant which happened about four years ago. We use this sound mark when we do webinars and audiovisual recordings.
A tip of the hat to the TTABlog
Yesterday I was delighted to see that John L. Welch had given a shout-out on
his very popular TTABlog to an article in my Ant-like Persistence blog. This was in his TTABlog Flotsam and Jetsam, Issue No. 15. If you’ve not already done so, you should subscribe to the TTABlog. John was doing blogging before it was trendy, for over a decade now, and his blog has probably at least ten times as many followers as mine has. So it’s very nice and very gracious for him to have linked to my blog. I estimate that his link brought at least a hundred new viewers to my blog.
On the subject of intellectual property blogs, there are other important blogs that you should subscribe to. These include the many sponsors of Meet the Bloggers, a moveable feast that has turned up at INTA meetings since the San Diego meeting in 2005. John has sponsored Meet the Bloggers many times, as have:
- Erik Pelton (Erik Pelton blog)
- Ron Coleman (Likelihood of Confusion blog)
- Marty Schwimmer (The Trademark Blog)
I’d guess there will likely be an eleventh annual Meet the Bloggers reception at the INTA meeting in San Diego in 2015.
And of course if you have not already done so, you should subscribe to Dennis Crouch’s Patently-O Blog.
The ® symbol
The alert reader will have already noticed today’s change to the banner above. The banner now contains the ® symbol next to the words “Ant-like Persistence”. The banner also contains a photograph (taken by yours truly) that shows some of the mountains nearby to our office in Summit County, Colorado.
USPTO trademark fees to drop on January 17
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. 
Continue reading “Replacing the bulbs in your car tail lights with LEDs”
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.