And now a letter to Congress, asking for some Congressional oversight on the Patent Center and DOCX problems. Richard Schafer did the work on this letter, so drop him a thank-you note. And thank David Boundy who first brought up this communications idea a few days ago.
Comments and suggestions on the letter, please, during the next 24 hours or so, and then we will lock it and collect signatures.
The attachments would be:
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- the letter to Director Vidal about Patent Center, with its attachments
- the recent Federal Register comments on DOCX
- the previous letter to the USPTO on DOCX
(directed to four people: both the chair and ranking members of the House (Darrell Issa and Hank Johnson) and Senate (Chris Coons and Thom Tillis) subcommittees. )
This letter is being sent to you as the chairs or ranking members of the House and Senate subcommittees on intellectual property to ask you to use your subcommittees’ oversight powers over the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The USPTO has announced plans to act in ways that will injure American inventors, applicants, and patent practitioners.
There are two such plans that need your attention:
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- The USPTO plans to replace its systems for filing patent applications and other patent documents on November 8, 2023, with a new system that is incomplete and full of errors. While the new system has many valuable improvements over the existing systems, it is simply not yet ready to replace the old systems.
- The USPTO is planning to require inventors and applicants to file patent applications in a format that puts inventors and applicants at risk of losing their intellectual property rights, or being subject to substantial but unnecessary and unjustified financial penalties. The USPTO’s plans are fundamentally flawed.
As you will see in the attached exhibits, groups of patent practitioners have written multiple letters to the USPTO that explain the problems with the USPTO’s plans, and that request the USPTO to abandon or at least delay the implementations of those plans. Rather than recite those letters here, copies of the correspondence that has been sent to the USPTO are attached as exhibits to this letter. Other intellectual property organizations have also objected to the USPTO’s plans. Despite the objections, the USPTO continues to move forward on its implementation of those plans.
As your subcommittees oversee the USPTO, we ask you to investigate the issues raised in the attached letters, and to convince the USPTO not to proceed as planned.