It is distressing to have to do fact-checking on USPTO webinars, but that is what the attendee is reduced to. In a September 19, 2023 webinar, the USPTO presenter stated that Patentcenter trouble ticket CP33 (“sort by patent number”) has been fixed. This is untrue.
In trouble ticket CP33, we provided a link to a blog article which details the programming mistake that the USPTO made when it coded the “sort by patent number” function in Patententer. The blog article was published on July 5, 2020, as was the trouble ticket CP33. In other words, the USPTO has by now had more than three years during which it could have fixed this defect in Patentcenter.
Which brings us to the September 19, 2023 USPTO webinar entitled How to make a smooth transition to Patentcenter. During this webinar, an attendee pointed out that the “sort by patent number” feature of Patententer is broken, and asked when the USPTO would fix it.
The presenter’s response was simply to state, falsely, that this defect has already been fixed. But anybody can go to Patentcenter right now and can see that it is broken today (September 21, 2023) in exactly the same way that it has been broken for more than three years now.
You can hear the presenter (MP3 file) here:
Here is a transcript:
Attendee question: The next question is the “sort by patent number” does not work correctly, and why is that?
USPTO answer: Actually that issue was recently fixed. So if you go to the workbench in the applications page, and try to sort by patent number, that should be working.
No, it was not “recently fixed”.
Typical USPTO …