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Free webinar: Learn about DAS and Designs

(Update:  The webinar took place and I think it went well.  To download the presentation slides or to watch a recording of the webinar, click here.)

It was all planned that I was going to be one of the speakers at USPTO Design Day 2020.  I was going to be presenting on the topic of DAS and Designs.  But Design Day got canceled.  What should I do with my presentation slides?  I’ll give the same presentation, but I’ll do it online.  This will be a free-of-charge webinar.  Maybe you’d like to attend, or maybe you know someone who’d like to attend.  Continue reading “Free webinar: Learn about DAS and Designs”

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USPTO 2020 Design Day is canceled

It is with regret that I report that USPTO 2020 Design Day, previously scheduled for April 23, 2020 (blog article), has been canceled.  I was really looking forward to attending the meeting.  I was scheduled to serve among the presenters at the meeting, speaking about the DAS system.

I will provide this presentation about the DAS system in a free-of-charge webinar on Tuesday, March 31.   To find out more about the webinar, or to register, click here.

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Help the meeting planners

Hello loyal blog readers.  Imagine how stressful it is right now for the people who are planning the upcoming intellectual property meetings.  INTA had planned its 2020 INTA Annual Meeting for Singapore, and canceled it, saying that it will schedule instead an annual meeting at some not-yet-selected city in the US, in May or June of 2020.  I gather that AIPLA is trying to figure out whether or not to keep in place its AIPLA Stated Spring Meeting presently scheduled for May 6-8 in San Antonio, Texas.  I have no doubt that the planners of the 2020 USPTO Design Day, scheduled for April 23 in Alexandria, Virginia, are wondering about all of this.  I imagine that the planners of the ABA-IPL 2020 Annual Meeting, scheduled for April 1-3 in Washington, DC are also wondering about all of this.  

The planners for those four meetings probably do not feel very comfortable trying to ask their potential attendees what their plans are.  But I can ask questions that they might not feel comfortable asking.  So I will.  And I will aggregate the responses and provide them to the planners of the four meetings.

Did you attend any of these four meetings in the past three years?  Are you thinking about attending one or more of these four upcoming meetings?  If so, please please please answer this short questionnaire and please do so by tomorrow, Wednesday, March 11.  It should only take two or three minutes and your answers might be a big help for the planners of these four meetings.  The questionnaire does not ask for your name or email address.  I will pass along the responses only in aggregated form.  

Thank you.

Carl Oppedahl

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Setting up remote access — computers

Recently at Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC we chose to explore possible work-from-home approaches.   This blog article and a previous article talk though some of the things that we are working on, in case it may be of interest to some readers.  The previous article talks about being able to unplug a phone from a desk in the office, and put the phone into car, and take it to an employee’s home, and plugging it in, and having it work just as it would in the office.  This article talks about being able to unplug a desktop computer from a desk in the office, and put the computer into car, and take it to an employee’s home, and plugging it in, and having it work just as it would in the office.  Continue reading “Setting up remote access — computers”

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Setting up remote access – telephones

Recently at Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC we chose to explore possible work-from-home approaches.   This blog article and some subsequent articles talk though some of the things that we are working on, in case it may be of interest to some readers. In this article we talk about setting up what we call “bat phones”, meaning phones that can be plugged in at the homes of employees and the phones work exactly as they would work in the office.  In a subsequent article we talk about setting up VPN access so that an employee might be able to take his or her desktop computer home, and plug it in, and have it work just as if it were in the office.  Continue reading “Setting up remote access – telephones”

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Filing at the International Bureau and Daylight Saving Time

It’s that time of year again.  The time of year when it is important to keep track of the fact that Daylight Saving Time is different in Switzerland from the way it is in the United States.  This is important because you might be in the US, and you might be e-filing (or fax-filing) some document with the International Bureau of WIPO. Continue reading “Filing at the International Bureau and Daylight Saving Time”

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Mexico joins Hague Agreement

Alert reader and experienced design practitioner Richard Stockton tipped me off that today, the Government of Mexico deposited its instrument of accession to the Hague Agreement.  This brings the number of members of the Hague system to 74.  

This accession has been among the most anticipated of Hague accessions in recent years.  I blogged about the imminent accession here (October 21, 2017) and here (December 11, 2017) and here (July 19, 2018) and here (October 2, 2018) and here (October 20, 2018) and here (November 5, 2018).  You can see the WIPO press release here.

Mexico joined the Patent Cooperation Treaty on January 1, 1995 and joined the Madrid Protocol on February 19, 2013.  Thus, with today’s accession Mexico achieves the trifecta of membership in all three international e-filing systems (patents, trademarks, and designs).  The Hague Agreement will enter into force in Mexico on June 6, 2020.

This means that from June 6, 2020, applicants in Mexico will be able to use the Hague system to protect their industrial designs.  Likewise applicants in many dozens of countries around the world will from that date be able to use the Hague system to protect their designs in Mexico.  

Now that Mexico has joined, perhaps the most eagerly awaited accession is that of China.

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USPTO bounces its own rendering of DOCX claims

I just received a Notice to File Corrected Application Papers telling me that the PDF claims in IFW for my newly filed patent application don’t have the right line spacing.   The Notice says that I have to reprint the claims and send them in again.  But get this — I filed those claims as a DOCX file — a character-based file.  Would you like to make a guess who it is that converted that DOCX file into a PDF file?  Yes.  It was the USPTO that did the conversion to PDF.  Not me.  So it’s the USPTO that got the line spacing wrong. Continue reading “USPTO bounces its own rendering of DOCX claims”

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Making sense of the February 14 Exam Guide from the Trademark Office – more inputs

Last Friday I received a letter dated February 28 from the Acting Commissioner for Trademarks, responding to the letter from the One Hundred Ninety-Nine Trademark Practitioners.  I posted it here for everybody to see.  The letter talks about the requirement that an email address be provided for the trademark owner even if the trademark owner is represented by counsel.  

We are all going to want to study that letter from the Acting Commissioner in our collective efforts to make sense of the February 14 Exam Guide.

The American Intellectual Property Law Association has a Committee called Trademark-Relations with the USPTO, of which I am a member.  The Committee, often referred to by the shorthand TRUC, was concerned about the February 14 Exam Guide.  The AIPLA, coordinating with TRUC, sent a letter to the Acting Commissioner with questions about the owner email address requirement.  As it turns out, February 28 was a busy day for the Acting Commissioner, because not only on that date did she send this letter to the 199, but she also sent a reply to the AIPLA.  A copy of the Acting Commissioner’s letter to the AIPLA may be seen here.

We are all going to want to study that letter from the Acting Commissioner as well, in our collective efforts to make sense of the February 14 Exam Guide.

I’m working on a blog article where I will try to make some sense of the February 14 Exam Guide in light of these two letters from the Acting Commissioner.