Acknowledging a human contact from the USPTO today

In this blog article I will acknowledge a welcome human contact from a USPTO person today. 

Earlier today (a Sunday morning) I stumbled upon a long-awaited development — it took three years of foot-dragging after the Patent Center listserv first told  the USPTO about this bug, but yes today after three years, the USPTO Patent Center developers fixed Patent Center bug CP31.

When I saw that the bug had gotten fixed, I blogged about its having gotten fixed.   And in that blog article, I griped that as usual, the USPTO did not do us the courtesy of letting us know that it had fixed a bug that we had reported.

The lack of such courtesy over the years prompted a paper letter that Seventy-Four Members of the Patent Center Listserv sent to the Commissioner for Patents on December 16, 2021, which presented several “asks”, one of which was:

Direct your developers to report back to the people of the Patentcenter listserv each time the developers clear a trouble ticket, referencing the listserv trouble ticket number in the report.

That letter to the Commissioner for Patents went unanswered, and the lack of courtesy (no report-backs to us when the USPTO cleared bugs that we had reported to the USPTO) continued.

Now to return to today’s events.  Early this morning, I stumbled upon the long-awaited and welcome event that the USPTO had fixed Patent Center bug CP31.  And, as I say, I blogged about it.  And I griped that as usual, the USPTO did not do us the courtesy of letting us know that they had fixed one of the bugs that our listserv had reported to to the USPTO.

Now we turn to the point of this blog posting, which is to acknowledge a human contact from the USPTO that happened just now.  I will start by saying that I am going out of my way not to say who the human being was, out of a concern that this person might get in trouble with his or her boss for having reached out.  But today, on a Sunday morning, an email arrived from a nice USPTO person.  This person wrote (paraphrasing slightly):

As requested … we have changed the default from 3 to 7 days.  This was completed over the weekend and you were on my e-mail list to acknowledge today.

This is a breath of fresh air.  The notion that a USPTO person may well have been on the verge of actually letting us know that the USPTO had fixed a Patent Center bug that we had reported to the USPTO … is most welcome.

As I say, I am not naming this person just now, out of a concern that this person might get in trouble with his or her boss.  But I’d like to acknowledge it.  I wrote back to thank this person.

Several recent interactions with high-up USPTO people have disappointed people in the patent community ( see for example this blog article).  But the thought of well-intentioned people communicating on shared goals (in this case, the shared goal of making Patent Center better) is refreshing.