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If you are a law firm, and if until recently you did your banking at BBVA USA bank, you already know most of what I am now describing. The acquisition by PNC bank of BBVA USA bank was a disaster. We are now in the process of dumping PNC Bank. If you are a law firm and you formerly did your banking at BBVA USA, I’d guess you are likewise now in the process of dumping PNC bank. Continue reading “BBVA USA bank to PNC bank acquisition was a disaster for law firms”
Update: I am pleased to be able to report that after about six hours, the server finished the “repair”. The new drive is now a full member of the RAID-1 array. The server has carried out the first of what will be a series of periodic SMART tests on the drive and it passed the SMART test. All is once again well with the server.
I was minding my own business when I heard a faint beeping. It turned out to be one of our Synology file servers. I could see on the blinky lights on the front of the server that the “status” light had turned from green to amber, and the light for “disk 1” had turned from green to amber. What did I do next? Continue reading “A beeping file server”
(Update: it is time for you, dear reader, to consider signing another letter. See blog posting.)
I have published several blog articles (see them here) warning practitioners about the problems with the USPTO’s ill-conceived plans for requiring patent applicants to submit their US patent applications in Microsoft Word format.
Every patent practitioner should attend a free-of-charge webinar that will be presented tomorrow by the Schwegman firm on this topic.
A look at how to file using DOCX documents in the USPTO Patent Center and how what you end up filing may not be what you intended to file. Or, just pay $400 more and submit a PDF of the application that the inventor approved.
To learn more or to register, click here.
Hello readers. I am getting back into the routine of presenting educational webinars. Here is the next one, with more on the way.
Other upcoming topics include:
What other topics would readers like to see in upcoming webinars? Post a comment below.
Let’s suppose you spent your formative years listening to music from the 1970’s and 1980’s with Koss Pro-4AA headphones, picking out and memorizing each vocal line, each guitar lick, each drum fill. Let’s suppose that even now, decades later, you can tap out each drum fill, and you can scat-sing each vocal part, from memory. And now in 2021 suppose there were somebody who somehow has gained access to lots of original studio multitrack tapes, and who has recorded incredibly perceptive Youtube programs in which he works though dozens of the great songs from that era, highlighting the bridges, the choruses, the verses, and every hook and chord change and suspension that made the song great.
Yes for those who savor recorded popular music, the person to listen to is a fellow in Atlanta who records brilliant Youtube programs in his basement. The guy is named Rick Beato. And if you love well-performed and well-produced popular music, you need to click away from this blog article and click over to his programs.
For an intellectual property lawyer, one of the interesting background questions is why his programs don’t instantly get taken down as copyright violations. And I think I know exactly why they don’t get taken down, and it has nothing to do with copyright law. I think it has to do with human feelings, as I will explain.
Continue reading “Brilliant deconstructions of popular songs”
I have written about how the swallowing of the service provider Afex by Cambridge Global Payments (aka Fleetcor, aka Corpay) has been a disaster (blog article, blog article, blog article). One of the most recent developments is that, perhaps in retaliation for these blog articles, a manager at Afex unilaterally decided to close our Afex account. This of course required figuring out how much money was in our account at Afex and then transferring it to one of our accounts at some bank account. It now looks like the manager did his math wrong, transferring an incorrect amount of money. And the so-called EZTrack web links that are supposed to tell us the status of the money transfer to us do not work. You can’t make this stuff up if you try. Continue reading “Afex even more down the tubes than that”
However bad I thought the swallowing of Afex into Corpay (Fleetcor, Cambridge FX) was (see blog article and blog article), I was mistaken. It is worse. I cannot in good conscience suggest that any Afex customer spend even a moment trying to preserve their customer relationship with Afex. Here are the latest disasters. Continue reading “Afex even more down the tubes”
There are many among us whose daily work includes the e-filing of sequence listings. By this we mean computer-readable listings of nucleotides and amino acids that form part of a patent application. The people who do this kind of work all made a mark on their calendars more than a year ago for January 1, 2022 for the Big Bang. Many of the people who do this kind of work belong to the ST.26 listserv (see blog article), which is an email discussion group for people who work with sequence listings when they e-file patent applications. (If you work with sequence listings, and if you have not yet joined the ST.26 listserv, then I suggest you join the listserv.)
The Big Bang relates to the way that the filer of a patent application formats the sequence listing. The way things are right now in 2021, if you are getting ready to file a patent application, and if you are going to need to include a sequence listing as part of the patent application, then you will be formatting it according to a standard called ST.25. But there is a new standard for the formatting of sequence listings called ST.26.
For more than a year, it had been planned that January 1, 2022 was the day when all of the patent offices of the world would commence requiring that a newly filed patent application be formatted according to ST.26 rather than ST.25. The colloquial way to say this is that what was going to happen on January 1, 202 was the “Big Bang”.
The big news is that all of the patent offices of the world recently had a meeting about ST.26 and they decided to postpone the Big Bang for six months, that is, until July 1, 2022.
This is, of course, a mix of good news and bad news, right?
For those filers who have been sort of dreading having to get used to the new way of formatting a sequence listing (that is, getting used to the ST.26 standard), then in a way this is good news. For most of us, if we think something is going to be unpleasant, then the news that the unpleasant thing is going to be delayed, it is a sort of natural reaction to count this as good news. On the other hand, some people will say that sometimes it is better just to “rip off the band-aid”. That if something has the potential to be unpleasant, maybe it is just as well to get it over with and to move on so that we can stop dreading the prospect of the dreaded event.
Not only that, but let’s assume for sake of discussion that there is some good reason for using ST.26 instead of ST.25. On this assumption, maybe it means that patent examiners can do their jobs better. Maybe it means that patent offices can do a better job of figuring out what is patentable and what is not. Maybe it means that when a searcher is doing a search in the database of all of the sequence listings that have ever been filed in any patent application (yes, there is such a database, and you can search it for free), the searcher will be able to do more and different kinds of searches that have a chance of leading more and better search results. Anyway, let’s assume this, that somehow ST.26 has a chance of promoting science and the useful arts better than ST.25.
If so, then the postponing of the Big Bang by six months is a postponement of whatever those benefits are of the use of ST.26.
So yes, this postponement is arguably a mix of both good news and bad news.
But setting aside whether you, the reader, personally think of the postponement of the Big Bang by six months as good news or bad news … I am posting this blog article to let you know, it is how things are going to be. The Big Bang for ST.26 will not happen on January 1, 2022 as previously scheduled. It will not happen until six months later, on July 1, 2022.
It will be recalled (blog article, August 7, 2021) that fifty-four trademark practitioners wrote to the Commissioner for Trademarks, asking that the Trademark Office computer systems be improved in several ways. I expect that at some point we will hear back in writing from Commissioner Gooder, but I thought I would pass along that I have heard back verbally from the Commissioner about this.
Briefly, the letter (which you can see here) asks that the Trademark Office enhance its computer systems so that there is room for more characters in the attorney docket number field, and so that there is room enough for the entirety of the holder address information that the International Bureau provides in Madrid Protocol designations, and room for more characters in the various mailing-address fields in the Trademark Office computer systems.
Continue reading “Commissioner for Trademarks responds to the Fifty-Four Trademark Practitioners”
A letter got sent today to the Director of Technology Center 2900 of the USPTO (Design Patents), Karen Young. The letter is signed by forty-eight design applicants and practitioners. You can see the letter here and you can track it in the Postal Service here. It should get delivered to the Director on Friday, October 15, 2021. The letter has four “asks”:
Here is how the letter begins:
The signers, personally or through their firms or corporations, have between them prosecuted more than twenty thousand United States design patents to issuance. The signers, personally or through their firms or corporations, have between them paid more than $26 million in fees to the United States Patent and Trademark Office in the past ten years.
It will be interesting to see what we hear back from Director Young in response to the letter.