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ST.26 “Big Bang” is officially postponed until July 1, 2022

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.

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Commissioner for Trademarks responds to the Fifty-Four Trademark Practitioners

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”

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Forty-Eight Design Practitioners write a letter to Director Young

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”:

  • When an Examiner gripes in an Office Action that a figure or a detail of a figure in a design patent application is blurry or unclear, can the Examiner please state up front in the Office Action whether the Examiner took that figure from IFW or from SCORE?  This will save the applicant or practitioner from having to phone up the Examiner to ask, and if the Examiner failed to look at the SCORE drawings, this will save a step in the process.
  • Just because the design Examiner can blow up a figure by 200% or 400% to find some real or imagined flaw in a vector drawing does not mean the Examiner should.  The practice of viewing figures at high magnification should only be pursued to the limited extent that it would actually make a difference in the figure as it would appear at normal scale in the actual issued patent.
  • When an Examiner pastes images into an Office Action to help show what is wrong with some figure in the design application, the images have gray scale in them.  This means the images get blurred when the Office Action gets loaded into IFW.  This means the applicant or practitioner does not actually get to see the image the same way it looked when the Examiner pasted it into the Office Action.  We ask that such Office Actions be stored in SCORE, not in IFW, so that the Office Actions do not get blurred.
  • The letter asks that the Issue Branch be directed always to use images from SCORE, not from IFW, when printing the issued design patent.

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.

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Afex going down the tubes, redux

It will be recalled (Afex Going Down the Tubes, September 30) that it seemed to me that money transfer service provider Afex, recently purchased by a company I never heard of before called Corpay, was going down the tubes as part of its process of being absorbed by Corpay. 

If anything, my reaction is that things are worse than I thought.

It will be recalled that the various documents and FAQs that are meant to reassure Afex customers that the acquisition process will be seamless say over and over again that your Relationship Manager will always be there to help.  The small problem being that our Relationship Manager had left the company a few months ago and no new person had been named as her successor as our Relationship Manager.  And it will be recalled that one of the FAQs helpfully provided a web-based form that a customer could complete and then a Relationship Manager would call the customer back Real Soon Now.  So I filled out the form and clicked submit and an email showed up a moment later thanking me for submitting the form and letting me know that my Relationship Manager would be getting back to me Real Soon Now.  That was on September 30, which is eight days ago.  And as of today, you guessed it, I have not heard back from anybody.

So yesterday I tried logging in on the Afex system for sending money transfers.  I did a test transfer to our firm’s own bank account.  That was yesterday.  The money should have reached our firm’s bank account by today or so at the latest.  Then every few hours I would click around in the Afex system trying to see some sort of confirmation that I had done the transfer.  Nope, no confirmation.  Finally today, about 26 hours after I did the transfer, a confirmation showed up.  The confirmation is worded and dated as if I had clicked “submit” today and as if the money probably won’t show up in our firm’s bank account until way next week some time.  Not good.  But so anyway I did happen do see that in the confirmation, it names an actual human being and provides two telephone numbers to call.  

click to enlarge

I dialed the first number which is 303-471-1161.  I get a recorded message “your call cannot be completed as dialed”.  I dialed the second number which is 866-428-2151.  The call goes through and is answered.  But it is answered by the squeal of a fax machine.  Or at least I am guessing it is a fax machine.  It is definitely not a human being.

Not good.

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You are invited to sign a letter to Tech Center Director Karen Young

(Update:  the letter has been sent.  See blog article.)

Hello design colleagues.  You are invited to join the signers of a letter to Karen Young, who is the Director of Technology Center 2900 (the tech center that examines design patent applications).  The letter will close for signatures at close of business today, Tuesday, October 12.  

You can see the letter here.  To sign it, click here.

The letter has four “asks”:

  • When an Examiner gripes in an Office Action that a figure or a detail of a figure in a design patent application is blurry or unclear, can the Examiner please state up front in the Office Action whether the Examiner took that figure from IFW or from SCORE?  This will save the applicant or practitioner from having to phone up the Examiner to ask, and if the Examiner failed to look at the SCORE drawings, this will save a step in the process.
  • Just because the design Examiner can blow up a figure by 200% or 400% to find some real or imagined flaw in a vector drawing does not mean the Examiner should.  The practice of viewing figures at high magnification should only be pursued to the limited extent that it would actually make a difference in the figure as it would appear at normal scale in the actual issued patent.
  • When an Examiner pastes images into an Office Action to help show what is wrong with some figure in the design application, the images have gray scale in them.  This means the images get blurred when the Office Action gets loaded into IFW.  This means the applicant or practitioner does not actually get to see the image the same way it looked when the Examiner pasted it into the Office Action.  We ask that such Office Actions be stored in SCORE, not in IFW, so that the Office Actions do not get blurred.
  • We ask that the Issue Branch be directed always to use images from SCORE, not from IFW, when printing the issued design patent.

To sign the letter, click here.  The letter will close for signatures today, Tuesday, October 12.  

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Maybe things are stable at VOIP.MS

I cringe to imagine how stressful things must have been in recent weeks at VOIP.MS, the provider of unbundled VOIP telephone services that we like to use.  As I reported in earlier blog posts, they were apparently attacked by a DDOS (distributed denial of service) attacker that demanded a ransom as a condition of stopping the attack.  My impression is the attacker never penetrated any of the systems of VOIP.MS, but merely flooded its servers with spurious data packets that were intended to overwhelm the servers so that normal customer activity was not able to take place.  

Anyway, the result of all of this is that the people at VOIP.MS had to take a variety of measures to harden their servers against the attack.  This required them to devise sophisticated ways to turn away the spurious packets while still, hopefully, allowing legitimate data packets from ordinary customers to work their way to the servers.  

So by now in our firm, we have migrated all of our phones and ATAs and other devices over to the various newly hardened servers.  And we have been doing daily tests of the various functions, including test calls to the ever-popular test phone number 720-230-1331 (try calling it!).  And so far as we can see, things are stable now.

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Afex going down the tubes

Loyal readers from a long time ago will recall that although I am now pretty enthusiastic about using Transferwise (now renamed “Wise”) for money transfers, before I discovered them my service provider of choice was Afex.  Afex was my service provider of choice because it was less bad than Travelex/Rausch which in turn was less bad than Western Union.  

But even though Transferwise turned out to be better than Afex in almost every way, I found I had to maintain our account at Afex for two reasons:

  • there are a few places where we were unable to send money with Transferwise (for example to businesses in Brazil) and Afex was able to do it;  and
  • there are a few countries where the sender might be located and they cannot send USD (US dollars) to us at our Transferwise bank details, but they can send USD to us at our Afex bank details.  One example is Lithuania and another example is the Cayman Islands.

But now it looks like Afex is going down the tubes, as I will detail.  Continue reading “Afex going down the tubes”

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Another provider of unbundled VOIP service is attacked

In an earlier blog post I mentioned that if a customer thinks they can dump VOIP.MS for another provider (because VOIP.MS is on the receiving end of a denial-of-service attack) and thus be clear of service troubles, the customer is probably mistaken.  My reason for saying this is that whoever you switch to, they could well be next in line to be attacked.

And that seems to be just what is happening. Continue reading “Another provider of unbundled VOIP service is attacked”

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Testing your VOIP phone during these difficult times

If your phone service relies on the provider VOIP.MS, then like us at OPLF you are from time to time needing to place a test telephone call to try to figure out whether the latest thing that you changed in your configuration has left you with functioning telephone service or not.  This is part of dealing with the denial-of-service attack that is going on even now  (blog article) against the provider VOIP.MS.

And even if your phone service does not rely on the provider VOIP.MS, it is probably only a matter of time before some denial-of-service attacker will attack the provider that your phone service depends on (this is happening, see blog article).  And when that time comes you are going to need to place a test telephone number from time to time to check to see whether your VOIP service is working the way it is supposed to work, or whether the most recent thing that you changed made things better or worse.

Wouldn’t it be nice if somebody somewhere would provide a telephone number that you could call at any hour of the day or night, and you could speak and hear your own voice repeated back to you (or not), and it would tell you that your VOIP service is working correctly (or is not working correctly).  I am pleased to remind you that there is such a telephone number.  Continue reading “Testing your VOIP phone during these difficult times”