Just when you thought you were completely familiar with the USPTO e-commerce systems, you realize you were missing something important for all these years. Yes, it turns out that for all of these years, the Public PAIR system has been used for filing of patent applications. See this USPTO News Brief published today, which is quoted at right.
Those of us who missed that very interesting patent application filing feature of Public PAIR spent the last many years using other alternative means, such as EFS-Web, for filing patent applications.
Part of this USPTO announcement is a reminder that in about two days, the USPTO plans to shut down Public PAIR. Those who have been getting the information that they need from Public PAIR will have no choice but to try to get the information from Patentcenter. If you have not already done so, you should join the Patentcenter listserv, which is an email discussion group for uses of Patentcenter. Through this listserv you can contribute to the Patentcenter Trouble Ticket system.
I am indebted to alert reader Jeffrey Sembrepon, who is a member of the Patentcenter listserv, who pointed out this very interesting piece of information in the USPTO News Brief.
Oh isn’t the USPTO being sneaky! One way to get folks to file using the Patent Center, tell them they can’t file like they used to in PAIR. Some folks just don’t know the difference between PAIR and EFS-web ?
One annoying aspect of losing public PAIR is that the file wrapper in PAIR included dates and document names automatically assigned in the bookmarks part of the multi-document PDF. Currently, the IFW document downloaded in PatentCenter doesn’t have informative file names.
Maybe someone could add this as a trouble ticket in the Patentcenter trouble ticket list. 🙂
odd it does for me. different than before but the names are still there and the date and the application number