Observations on patents and other IP from a dual-licensed practitioner
This is the story of a US patent application that went abandoned and thus shouldn’t have been published, but which the USPTO published nevertheless because of an improper benefit claim,…
Several years ago, at the behest of Israel patent practitioners who were miffed that their lawyer colleagues receive a cute picture ID card every year from the bar association, the…
[Update, March 5: on February 26, the Department of the Interior filed a consolidated cancellation action against 7 DNC marks.] A few years ago I wrote a blog post in…
Today we received two letters from the ILPTO asserting that we owed excess page fees in two applications. Upon checking the applications, we found that in one of the applications…
A major snowstorm arrived along the east coast of the USA over the weekend, dumping more snow than the "Snowmaggedon" that struck in 2010. The USPTO was closed yesterday and will evidently be…
As we predicted last week, the ILPTO Commissioner today published an announcement in which he rescinded the "no second generation divisonal" practice that had been in place since mid-2010. All's well…
We’ve blogged in the past about the ILPTO’s strange, ultra vires policy announcement in early 2010 to forbid the filing of second-generation divisional applications (2GDs) after the grandparent case has…
On December 20, the Israel PTO's electronic patent filing system is slated to go online. This should be welcome news, and in general it is, but…well, we're not going to…
On October 21, revisions to the Israel Patent Regulations were published, after being approved by the relevant Knesset committee. Yes, we know that’s truly exciting news for most readers…NOT. In…
For last month or so, we've been receiving weekly emails inviting us to an IP conference to be held in Dubai. The organizers are billing it as the "Largest Intellectual Property…
As mentioned in just about every US newspaper, as well as on this blog, last month a company called Turing Pharmaceuticals and its apparently sociopathic CEO gained notoriety for buying…
Last year we wrote about the Clinton campaign's spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to abuse trademark law in order to silence a critic who sold t-shirts and mugs mocking that campaign's candidate. Now…
Periodically there are reports in the news about the price of some drug being high, and the blame is usually placed on patents, particularly patents that cover not the active…
That's a famous line from Mel Brooks' "History of the World", ostensibly uttered by Louis XVI, but on the basis of recently-issued US 9,119,029, it would seem to true of Google…
The big news today in the business world is the announcement by Google that's it's doing a corporate restructuring and has set up a company called "Alphabet" that will be…
In the summer of 2012 we filed a non-provisional application at the USPTO. We included color drawings (actually, photographs). We also duly filed a petition for the USPTO to accept…
If the above title seems to be a non-sequitur, keep reading, because it’s not. There’s been a lot of writing in the IP world recently about a US federal district…
A recurring theme on this blog, and in other online fora, is the knuckleheaded way in which the USPTO processes incoming documents. Would it take so much effort to explain…
In 2014 we wrote about a report from the National Academy of Inventors and the Intellectual Property Owners Association which listed the universities worldwide that received the most U.S. utility patents in…
One of the nice things about the “electronic age” is that instead of having voluminous paper files to keep records, you can store all those documents on a drive that’s…
Yesterday the ILPTO announced, via its email distribution list and on its web site (the link to the actual announcement is this one), that a new database of registered designs…
One of the things we patent attorneys learn is that in pretty much any area of human endeavor where there’s money to be made, someone will be profiting, and more…
Two years ago, I wrote about Memorial Day in Israel. I wrote about how it’s vastly different than in the USA because here everyone has lost a loved one or…
Passover is nearly upon us. At the traditional Seder, the Jews commemorate the Exodus from Egypt and recount, inter alia, the plagues that the Bible records being visited upon the…
This is somewhat off-topic for this blog, but it touches on something of a sore point, namely the indentured servitude to which men’s football and basketball players at major US…
I posted the following earlier today on one of Carl Oppedahl's listserves – sort of a follow-on to this earlier post. So far positive responses, but no one coming forward…
Now that we're into the post-ballot-casting, horse-trading-wheeling-dealing part of the Israeli election process, I went back and checked on the Likud video that I wrote about here. It's no longer…
While everyone else was focused on election results, yesterday the ILPTO announced via its email list that next month, in conjunction with WIPO, it will be sponsoring "Roving Seminars" in…
I’m Dan Feigelson. I’ve been practicing patent law for over 30 years. I’m also opinionated, as you may discover in reading my writings here.