Today I did an experiment.  The goal was to find out whether ChatGPT can replace me for some patent tasks.  It seems the answer is “yes”. 

This blog article describes yet another nice customer experience with WIPO.  I was delighted to find that WIPO makes it so that I can “call for free” to WIPO.  And the person who answer…

A few days ago was my first-ever successful DMR (digital mobile radio) activity (blog article).  Today was my second — I participated in a World Wide Check-In. 

It turns out that there is a thing called DMR or digital mobile radio (Wikipedia article). This is a thing that some radio amateurs do. To do DMR, you use a “hot spot” such as the one s…

Long-time PCT enthusiasts will appreciate that in recent years, there have been few opportunities in the US to get high quality PCT training with more than one experienced presenter on the dais. Su…

Save the date!  The next PCT Seminar will be September 22-24, 2026 near the Denver airport.

Over and over again I somehow stumble upon or learn about a thing that seemingly almost everybody else already knew.  Today’s question is, why are shower head nozzles flexible?  You probably …

Now there is an Office Action in the red-hair-and-tinsel trademark application (previous blog article).  You can see the TSDR page and the Office Action.  The Examining Attorney gives several bases…

I am intrigued to hear about a WIPO initiative called the “Global IP Assignment Platform” (GIPAP).  I suggest that interested practitioners and IP owners register for one of these upcoming WIPO web…

It will be recalled (blog article, April 30, 2026) that recently I had a luggage tracking tag get knocked loose from my suitcase and the tag ended up at an airport in Portugal.  Thanks to comments …

The Trademark Office at the USPTO does not handle Unicode characters well.  This blog post discusses a recent example of this. 

Well, the unspoken thing has just been spoken.  “The only other thing I can recommend is just use [Microsoft] Word.”

The USPTO’s non-DOCX surcharge is now rearing its ugly head again.  Let’s see if, between now and tomorrow, May 15, 2026, the USPTO people in charge of the non-DOCX penalty provide dece…

Yesterday I sent a US trademark application to a client to review and e-sign.  Today came the email from Trademark Center telling me the client had e-signed it.  I was invited to click to pay the m…

It looks like an attorney in Florida hopes to get exclusive rights to have red hair with pink tinsel, as trade dress for attorney services.  No, I am not making this up. 

After many years of foot-dragging, Apple is reluctantly making end-to-end encryption available for RCS messaging. 

Are you attending the AIPLA Spring 2026 meeting at the San Francisco Fairmont hotel?  If so, I invite you to attend some PCT training on Wednesday, May 13 from 4PM to 6PM in the French Room.  Your …

It is my honor to post: the fourteenth annual US Design Patent Toteboard, the eleventh annual US Trademark Registration Toteboard, the eleventh annual US Utility Patent Toteboard, and the seventh a…

What we see today is some user-friendliness on the part of the European Patent Office.   EPO is now making it even easier than before for PCT applicants to receive communications electronically fro…

I use luggage tracking tags.  As you can see from the map at right, it looks like my medium-sized suitcase is at Porto Airport in Portugal.  Actually the suitcase is with me right now at home in th…

I find it interesting that nowadays, a lot of my blog traffic comes from Reddit. 

For more than thirty years I have sponsored The Listservs.  Each listserv is an email discussion group.  I have sponsored listservs for patent practitioners, for trademark practitioners, and for in…

Two days ago I blogged (see blog article) about a hallucination on the USPTO’s new web site, namely the existence of a “provisional patent”.    The web site said: File a provision…

Recently I added an environmental sensor to a rooftop solar meshtastic node.  This provides telemetry of temperature, humidity, and air pressure.  In this article I describe what was required to ac…

There is no such thing as a “provisional patent”.  Everyone knows this.  Everyone except, it turns out, the United States Patent and Trademark Office. 

When I was first in practice, a long time ago, the only ways to communicate with a patent examiner at the USPTO were: postal mail (and couriers) telephone calls fax hand-carry. The USPTO’s po…

Recent news articles talk about instances where Anthropic’s Mythos AI is said to have found software flaws in pieces of software that have been around for a long time.  The pieces of software…

I must confess I was not aware, until a few moments ago, that there was such a thing as a World Quantum Day. You can see the Wikipedia page about World Quantum Day. You can see a nice video with so…

Two USPTO people need to be retrained, and I don’t know their names.  I don’t even know how to reach the supervisor of either of those USPTO people.  In the old days, I would just drop …

As any experienced trademark practitioner will tell you, it is a big mistake to use a trademark as a noun.  Using a trademark as a noun (e.g., “Pass me a Kleenex”) instead of an adjecti…

Many long-time readers of this blog will recall the anxieties leading up to the year 2000.  The worry was that some software systems, to squeeze more information into less memory, were storing only…

It will be recalled (blog article) that Legrand had permitted its Eliot cloud to fall into disrepair.  It appears that Legrand has restored its Eliot cloud to normal function. 

Most readers of my blog will recall my blog article dated March 2, 2020 entitled Charging port redundancy.  The article talked about how nice it is if a maker of a notebook computer would set it up…

For the patent practitioner who represents clients whose patent applications get rejected over Section 101, some new tools have recently been added to the practitioner’s toolbox that might he…

We have a case in Technology Center 2100 in which we responded to a non-final Office Action on September 15, 2025. Normally such a response would have gotten forwarded to the Examiner (by the LIE) …

One of the places where our firm receives mail is a post office box.  As recently as a couple of years ago, the USPS did not permit our firm to sign up for informed delivery with respect to our pos…

Here is a sanctions order in a patent litigation case in federal district court in Kansas.  Several lawyers permitted their names to appear in a signature block of a brief.  The brief contained a c…

Hello dear readers.  On and around February 28, there will be opportunities to see several planets in the sky.   This will be shortly after sunset. The planets that will be easy to see are Venus, J…

Hello readers.  It is now 2026 and this means it is time to get in your numbers for the 2025 toteboards: Fourteenth Annual US design patent toteboard Eleventh Annual US utility patent toteboard Sev…

The USPTO has issued a show-cause order dated January 27, 2026 which you can see here.  The order has an Exhibit A listing 3361 trademark applications.  The order sets a thirty-day period (ending o…

For years I have hoped that Barnes & Noble would, through its Nook service, serve as a competent ebook competitor to Amazon’s Kindle service.  My recent experience with Nook is a complete…

We all see in the news that earlier today (Thursday, January 22) Microsoft had some massive internal crash that affected lots of people who had selected Microsoft (aka Outlook) to handle their emai…

Oppedahl Patent Law Firm LLC (“OPLF”) sponsors many listservs (email discussion groups for intellectual property professionals), some with over a thousand members.   In recent days, hun…

I was paying an Issue Fee in Patent Center, I clicked “submit”, and at right you can see what happened next.  “There was an error”. That’s it. The developers of Patent…

Hello listserv colleagues!  I think the listservs are more or less back in service.  But for about 30% of our listserv members, the member’s email service provider (ESP) is blocking our posti…

Day-to-day users of Patent Center are accustomed to the USPTO’s requirement that you provide two-factor authentication (“2FA”) as part of the login process.  It turns out that you…

Today (Christmas Day, December 25, 2025) the USPTO for the first time emailed outgoing correspondence notifications (OCNs, shown at right) for three pieces of outgoing patent correspondence that ha…

The executive summary is:  the listservs are broken.  I am working on getting them back into service. 

On March 22, 2024 the USPTO published a Federal Register Notice saying that the USPTO would start accepting electronic signatures generated by some commercial e-signature platforms.  You can see, a…

Thanks to John L. Welch’s hundreds of blog articles about 2d refusals, I have gotten to the point where sometimes I can guess correctly the outcome of an ex parte appeal of a 2d refusal.  The…