Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
As mentioned in a previous post, USPTO will be required to hand in its report detailing its plan for eliminating work-from-home within the next nine business days. I don’t envy the USPTO’s task on this. Many of us recall a song by Miley Cyrus (Wikipedia article) that says:
And we can’t stop …
And we won’t stop …
I predict that USPTO’s report, reduced to its essence, will be along the lines of:
And we can’t stop [doing work-from-home]
And we won’t stop [doing work-from-home]
Recall my blog post of a couple of days ago on Trump’s “Return to in-person work” order. Now the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) and Office of Management and Budget (OMB) have issued “further guidance” to agencies on their ending of work-from-home. It is dated January 27, 2025 and you can see it here. Continue reading “Further guidance from OPM and OMB to agencies about ending work-from-home”
Hello readers. It will be recalled (see here and here and here) that I offered readers the opportunity to pick where I should conduct the next live in-person PCT seminars. I collected responses for the past week and a half. Each respondent was asked to say what city they wanted to suggest, and was asked to say how many attendees they thought they might send to the seminar.
I have now closed the survey form. The survey received 54 responses.
At the time that I posted this survey, I figured I must be smarter than everybody else — surely I knew which two locations would turn out to be the right places to conduct the next seminars. But the two locations I was so sure of (Alexandria, VA and San Jose, CA) did not even end up in the top five positions in the ranking. Go figure. Now you can see the top-ranked cities in the survey results. Continue reading “Where the next live in-person PCT seminars should take place?”
(The brief answer is, most employees of the USPTO who work from home will not need to do anything differently in the near term, and instead will have to await “separate guidance.”)
On his first day at work, one of the executive orders signed by Trump was an order (see it here) aiming to terminate “remote work arrangements”. The order, dated January 20, 2025, says:
Heads of all departments and agencies in the executive branch of Government shall, as soon as practicable, take all necessary steps to terminate remote work arrangements and require employees to return to work in-person at their respective duty stations on a full-time basis, provided that the department and agency heads shall make exemptions they deem necessary. Continue reading “How Trump’s “Return to in-person work” order affects the USPTO”
Hello readers. As a reminder, it is now 2025 and this means it is time to get in your numbers for the 2024 toteboards:
The goal is to recognize and rank law firms in the US based upon the numbers of US design patents, US utility patents, US plant patents, and US trademark registrations each firm obtained for clients in 2024.
The questionnaires will close on Friday, February 14, 2025.
Every year after I post the results of the toteboards, I get sad emails from firms that want me to accept their numbers late. This would, of course, typically result in kicking other firms down in the rankings — other firms that got their numbers in on time. Please help to reduce the number of such sad emails that I will receive this year. Maybe you are a person at your firm who is responsible for getting these numbers in. If so, please get your numbers in! Otherwise, please forward this blog posting to somebody at your firm to make sure that somebody at your firm gets the numbers in for your firm.
You can see the previous toteboards here, going back to the earliest toteboard in 2012.
Hello PCT enthusiasts. There are only a few days remaining for you to help to determine where the next few live in-person PCT seminars will be. I will close the survey maybe next Monday or so. As of right now, the top-ranked locations are:
Well, if you want any confirmation as to who is running the USPTO now, you have it. Coke Morgan Stewart was sworn in shortly after the Trump inauguration yesterday, and just nineteen hours later, the usual round of Tuesday patent issuances took place, and her signature was on those patents.
In contrast, it looks as though none of the US trademarks that got registered today actually have registration certificates. I imagine there was some flurry of activity at the USPTO yesterday to yank all of the to-be-mailed registration certificates with Derrick Brent’s signature on them, and right now there is some further flurry of activity to (a) generate fresh registration certificates and (b) get them cryptographically signed.
A month ago, former USPTO Director Kathi Vidal departed from the USPTO.
Some days ago, apparently Acting Director Derrick Brent quietly departed from the USPTO.
It seems that a few minutes after the inauguration of Donald Trump, on a day when the USPTO was closed due to federal holiday, a new Acting Director got sworn in at the USPTO. It seems that the new Acting Director is a Coke Morgan Stewart. You can read about her here, in an official bio that got posted on a day when the USPTO was closed due to federal holiday.
Conspicuously absent from her official bio at the USPTO is a mention of any technical background. According to the USPTO’s Find a patent practitioner, she lacks a registration number. My guess is that she has never written a patent application or prosecuted a US patent to issuance. I would welcome the opportunity to be shown wrong about this.
In an earlier blog article I highlighted the profound inadequacy of the user documentation for USPTO’s Patent Public Search system. Here is yet another example of this inadequacy. In the screen shot above I quote, in its entirety, the USPTO’s user documentation for the search field “ASTC”. I defy any public user of USPTO’s Patent Public Search system to make any sense of this inadequate documentation. What, pray tell, do you get if the “assignee type” that you search for is “02”? What other numerical values can be searched for, and what do they mean? Continue reading “How to use “assignee type code” in Patent Public Search?”
Each year, US patent practitioners need to count up how many patents they obtained for clients in the previous year, for submission to the toteboards. What naturally comes to mind is the idea that maybe the USPTO’s Patent Public Search would permit a practitioner to get the answer. But USPTO’s Patent Public Search has, objectively, the worst search user interface that one could devise. Scroll to the end to see how you might use Patent Public Search to get your numbers for the toteboards.
Continue reading “Extracting toteboard numbers from USPTO’s “Patent Public Search””