Month: April 2020

Recently the USPTO opened up access to Patentcenter to all users.  (Previously it was open only to certain alpha and beta testers.)  This prompted me to set up a new listserv for Patentcenter users (to learn more or to subscribe, click here).  Alert listserv member Shannon Vieau raised a fascinating issue namely that the reel and frame numbers listed for recorded assignments in Patentcenter often do not match those listed for recorded assignments in PAIR.  Prompted by her listserv posting (thank you!) I looked up one of our cases where in PAIR it says what you see above.

Meanwhile in Patentcenter it says what you see at right.  Yeah.  The frame number is the same in the two places — 366.  But in PAIR the reel number is 048299 while in Patentcenter the reel number is 17237.  One of them is clearly wrong.

Which one is correct?  The answer is, Patentcenter is wrong.  PAIR is correct.  Shannon reported this to the EBC today.  It will be interesting to see how long it takes for this to get fixed.

(Update:  I am astonished and disappointed to see that the USPTO developers made this exact same mistake four years later, in Trademark Center.  See blog article.)

(Update:  it took more than six months from when we reported the bug, but USPTO did finally fix it.  See blog article.)

When you are e-filing a new utility patent application in EFS-Web, one of the ways to make the priority claim is by means of a web-based Application Data Sheet.  There’s a place in EFS-Web where you can say that you are adding a priority claim, and it gives you a drop-down menu of patent offices where your priority application might have been filed.

USPTO has had users alpha-testing and beta-testing its new system called Patentcenter, which will eventually replace EFS-Web.  Patentcenter has a similar web-based ADS function that allows you to make a priority claim when you are filing a new patent application.  When you use this function, eventually you reach this drop-down menu of patent offices where your priority application might have been filed.  Can you guess which well-known foreign patent office is missing from this drop-down list in Patentcenter? Continue reading “Can’t claim priority in Patentcenter?”

New users of Patentcenter will learn soon enough that there is a way that Patentcenter breaks USPTO’s own rules.

If there’s anything that patent practitioners learn the hard way, it is that the USPTO systems ruin any PDF that contains color or gray scale when the PDF gets loaded into IFW.  I documented this back in 2006 as you can see here.  USPTO recognized this (EFS-Web guidelines) at least as long ago as 2008:

Text of other colors [other than black] may not convert to image properly, resulting in unreadable or invisible text.

So imagine how disappointing it is to see that the designers of Patentcenter have set it up so that every single form generated by Patentcenter for loading into IFW is filled with color and gray scale!  Which violates USPTO’s own rules for images to be e-filed in IFW. Continue reading “Patentcenter creates and loads color and gray scale into IFW”

Are you using Patentcenter?  Are you planning to use Patentcenter now that it is open for all filers (blog article)?  If you have not already done so, you should join the Patentcenter listserv.  This is an email discussion group for users of USPTO’s Patentcenter system.  To join the listserv, click here.  Continue reading “Join the new Patentcenter listserv”

Until now, only certain filers were able to gain access to USPTO’s Patentcenter system.  To gain access, the filer had to be visiting from an IP address on a particular approved list.

Starting yesterday, April 20, 2020, the USPTO removed the IP address restrictions.  Now anybody can reach the Patentcenter web site.

To reach Patentcenter, go to this web page:  https://patentcenter.uspto.gov/.

What is Patentcenter?  Why do you care? Continue reading “USPTO opens Patentcenter to all filers”