You are invited to sign a letter to Tech Center Director Karen Young

(Update:  the letter has been sent.  See blog article.)

Hello design colleagues.  You are invited to join the signers of a letter to Karen Young, who is the Director of Technology Center 2900 (the tech center that examines design patent applications).  The letter will close for signatures at close of business today, Tuesday, October 12.  

You can see the letter here.  To sign it, click here.

The letter has four “asks”:

• When an Examiner gripes in an Office Action that a figure or a detail of a figure in a design patent application is blurry or unclear, can the Examiner please state up front in the Office Action whether the Examiner took that figure from IFW or from SCORE?  This will save the applicant or practitioner from having to phone up the Examiner to ask, and if the Examiner failed to look at the SCORE drawings, this will save a step in the process.
• Just because the design Examiner can blow up a figure by 200% or 400% to find some real or imagined flaw in a vector drawing does not mean the Examiner should.  The practice of viewing figures at high magnification should only be pursued to the limited extent that it would actually make a difference in the figure as it would appear at normal scale in the actual issued patent.
• When an Examiner pastes images into an Office Action to help show what is wrong with some figure in the design application, the images have gray scale in them.  This means the images get blurred when the Office Action gets loaded into IFW.  This means the applicant or practitioner does not actually get to see the image the same way it looked when the Examiner pasted it into the Office Action.  We ask that such Office Actions be stored in SCORE, not in IFW, so that the Office Actions do not get blurred.
• We ask that the Issue Branch be directed always to use images from SCORE, not from IFW, when printing the issued design patent.

To sign the letter, click here.  The letter will close for signatures today, Tuesday, October 12.