The USPTO developers don’t even play by their own rules, as I will describe here. The USPTO developers have (needlessly) decided to bust the chops of anybody who tries to upload a PDF file having a file name that ends with … wait for it … “PDF” (blog article). And the USPTO developers refuse to allow use of the web-based 85B issue fee payment system for any 35-series patent application. This means that the user who finds the need to pay an Issue Fee in a 35-series application has little choice but to do it the hard way. The user must download the PDF Form 85B from IFW, and then type the needed information onto the PDF Form 85B (virgule signature, assignee name, attorney-agent-or-firm name). At this point, what the user needs to do next is to upload the USPTO’s own PDF Form 85B to Patent Center.
But what will happen next shows the developers failing to play by their own rules. Patent Center pukes on the uploaded document. Patent Center scolds the user for failing to be “compliant” with the developers’ needlessly restrictive “file naming conventions.”
Why did Patent Center puke on the USPTO’s own PDF Form 85B? The answer, and I am not making this up, is that the USPTO provides the USPTO’s own PDF Form 85B with “PDF” as the last three characters.
Yes, as you can see from this screen shot, the USPTO developers provide the PDF Form 85B in a way that violates the developers’ own “file naming conventions”.
And yes, before you post a comment pointing out the parenthesis in the file name, I already knew about that, and I deleted the offending parenthesis, and still what happened next is that Patent Center puked on the PDF file that had “PDF” as the last three characters of the file name.
The Patent Center doesn’t work. What “staff” can do and what a “practitioner” can do is upside-down. Ask you staff to stage a RCE and QPIDS for your review (can’t)? Try “previewing” a RCE form (boxes look unchecked, but downloading the form it is checked). The EBC just wash their hands of the whole debacle.
I freaking hate this issue because I am not technologically savvy enough to always understand why $hit doesn’t work correctly on Patent Center.