Category: Industrial Designs

On November 19 I blogged about the “Ghost Art Unit” at the USPTO.  This was art unit 2910, headed by SPEs Cathron Brooks and Joel Sincavage.  This was a curious art unit with no Examiners.  Our firm had some fifteen design patent applications stalled in this art unit.  The cases had no First Office Action Prediction, which was no surprise given that the art unit had no Examiners.  A comment by a USPTO person gave me the impression that a couple of thousand design patent applications, all GUI (graphical user interface) applications, were assigned to this art unit. Continue reading “Ghost art unit apparently disbanded”

Well, one of our oldest design patent applications, one that had been parked in the “ghost art unit” for some seven months, is now out of the ghost art unit.  Just today it got transferred to art unit 2911, and after some seven months without a First Office Action Prediction (“FOAP”), it again has an FOAP.

The FOAP is six months, that is, USPTO now estimates that it will examine this case in about June of 2015.

USPTO’s First Office Action Estimator says that for a newly filed application in art unit 2911, the estimated time for a newly filed design patent application to get a first office action is 13 months from now.

What’s weird about this is that our application was filed September 23, 2013.  With a backlog of 13 months, this would suggest our application should have been examined in about October of 2013.  Over a month ago.  Our seven months in the ghost art unit seem to have pushed this application back in the queue so that it will get examined much later than it should have.

Well you take what you can get.  At least this application is now back in the normal Examining Corps and after some seven months of being unable to do so, we can once again track its progress through the system.

We have over a dozen other design patent applications that were filed more recently than this one, that are still parked in the ghost art unit.  We will continue to keep an eye on them and hopefully they too will eventually be transferred to a real art unit.

The USPTO publishes statistics on the size of the backlog for the various art units.  Which design art units have the worst backlogs?

Continue reading “Which design art units are the busiest?”

There’s a ghost art unit at the USPTO.  It has patent applications assigned to it, but it has no Examiners.  If you have the bad luck to have one of your patent applications assigned to this ghost art unit, the application will never get examined.  At least, it will never get examined for so long as it sits in this art unit.

At our firm we try to track the FOAPs — first office action predictions — for our pending patent applications.  We try to keep track of which art units are bogged down and which ones take up new applications sooner.  We stumbled upon the existence of this ghost art unit when we kept noticing that some of our pending applications had no FOAP at all.

Continue reading “The ghost art unit at the USPTO”