America-Israel Patent Law

Christmas Patents (Here's Looking at You, Hymie D)

In days of old when dinosaurs roamed the land and my brother still maintained his 12:01 Tuesday blog, he wrote once (I think) about the fact that for a long time, the USPTO has issued patents on Tuesdays, come rain, shine, or Christmas.  One such patent, 2775048, was issued in 1956 to our grandfather, Hymie D Berman.  This patent describes and claims a felt board and associated characters for display on the board.  If there are collectors of antiques out there, we have inherited some items similar to the one shown in the patent, although I'm not sure that the items are what was covered by this patent.

Hymie was granted several other US patents, including D166239, which covered his most recognizable creation, the Judy clock, which had a bright yellow face, red arms, a painted blue bezel and gears visible through a window so kids could see them turn as the hands were moved.  The Judy clock is still sold today (in a somewhat modified version).

Life Imitates...Life: USPTO Systems Down. Again.

[Note: this was originally posted at 11:40 local time. It's now 15:47 and it seems that some of the systems are back online. No explanation for the crash has been provided by the USPTO.]

On December 15, 1836, the US Patent Office was destroyed in a fire. (Hat tip Richard Schafer.)

On December 15, 2021, the US Patent Office's computer systems crashed. No e-filing of patents or trademarks, no checking databases, no access to electronic records. (But at least the page about McGruff the Crime Dog is still working!) The USPTO sent out an email warning people of the crash:

But if you click on the embedded link in the announcement to get more info, you'll find something extraordinary: during this outage, the USPTO is accepting patent and trademark correspondence, including new patent and trademark applications by email to PatentApp15DEC21@uspto.gov (for patents) or TrademarkApp15DEC21@uspto.gov (for trademarks).

This is extraordinary because presently, the USPTO is not authorized to accept such filing by email. This must be one serious mess for the USPTO to take this step.

This is not to say that everyone can avail himself of email filing. Before saying that one can file by email, the announcement includes a non-functional link to a web page that describes various filing options during a computer outage, and says that you only get to file by email if you can't use one of those alternatives. Those alternatives include fax, first class US mail with a certificate of mailing, and Priority Express Mail from the USPS. Is the USPTO going to demand proof that the filer couldn't avail himself of one of those methods of filing before he sent that email?  

[That webpage mentioning alternative filing methods also takes pains to point out that if you don't file electronically, you have to pay the $400 surcharge for non-electronic filing ($200 if you're a small entity).  I guess the USPTO isn't subject to legal doctrines like frustration of contract. Or as we might say in these parts, הרצחת וגם ירשת?. (Look up Elijah's reproof of Ahab for the context.) The last time there was a major outage of this sort, then-Director Andre Iancu had the decency to waive that fee post-facto, as discussed here. Let's hope that the current USPTO powers-that-be will be similarly reasonable this time around.]

Amazingly, just two days earlier, Carl Oppedahl blogged about this very problem, as the USPTO has just published a Federal Register notice in anticipation of an planned move of its back-up servers away from the same place where its regular servers are housed. Carl noted that there have been four serious outages of the USPTO's systems since 2014; the current outage constitutes the fifth such failure.

For those of us who regularly file things at the USPTO, this comes against the backdrop of the USPTO's insistence on migrating to a new system, which it calls PatentCenter, which it insists will have all the functionalities of public and private PAIR as well as EFS.  As explained in a letter drafted by Carl, signed by seventy four practitioners (including yours truly), and sent by Carl earlier today to Drew Hirshfeld, who is nominally in charge of things at the USPTO right now, so far PatentCenter is a disaster, and the USPTO has refused to listen to users who explain what's wrong with it.

As a colleague once noted, technology is great...when it works.

 

Butterfingers? Not This Time (Not Really Patent-Related)

In the first half of 2020, particularly around Passover, there were shortages of butter in Israel. Given the centralized production of milk in Israel, what is surprising isn't that there were butter shortages, but that there haven't been more in the 31 years I've been living here.

In response, the state lifted the import tariffs of 140-160% on imported butter. But that was a temporary measure: the tariffs are scheduled to come back into force on January 1, 2022. Rather than letting this opportunity to do some good slip through its fingers, the government (now led by Bennett, rather than Netanyahu, on whose watch the tariffs were originally removed) has now announced its intention to make the lifting of tariffs on butter permanent.  Good thing this is being done by order of a minister rather than by a vote in the Knesset, otherwise Likud would vote against it b/c the coalition is for it.

Maybe the state will next stop controlling ownership of beehives and production of honey.