Here folks is a job posting for an intriguing PCT-related job opening at WIPO in Switzerland.
HEAD, PCT USER RESOURCES SECTION – P5 – 21201-FT
PCT Legal and User Relations Division, PCT Legal and International Affairs Department, Patents and Technology Sector
Application Deadline – 21-October-2021
The USPTO’s Financial Manager system is broken today. It is generating a monthly report that says your USPTO Deposit Account has a balance of zero even if your Deposit Account has lots of money in it. Continue reading “USPTO’s Financial Manager is broken today”
WIPO has two upcoming PCT webinars.
In this webinar you will be guided through the different steps on how to establish eHandshakes, create an access rights group, manage/share access rights and request eOwnership of already filed PCT applications. Your presenters are Pascal Piriou and Jiao Mo.
Tuesday 07 September : 09-10.30 am (Asia, India, Europe time zones…)
Registration link: https://wipo-int.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_lVwEVDu_TxSOwi7IUJZFXw
Wednesday 08 September: 4:30-6:00 pm (America time zones)
Registration link: https://wipo-int.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_EbCdVUgTSSOUbcaPlvmonA
In a previous blog article I reviewed USPTO’s progress with fixing known bugs in Patentcenter. In this blog article I now review USPTO’s progress in implementing feature requests and enhancements that beta users have asked USPTO to provide in Patentcenter.
By way of comparison, patent practitioners are accustomed to the responsiveness of WIPO when users suggest improvements and enhancements to the ePCT system. It is commonplace to see user-friendly features that get added to ePCT specifically because users have asked for them. WIPO personnel are subscribed to all of the relevant listservs and user groups for PCT users, and frequently it will be seen that a bug will get fixed or a feature will get added specifically because a WIPO person will have responded to a question or a comment in a listserv or in a discussion group.
If you have not already done so, you should join the PCT listserv and the Patentcenter listserv.
With this background, one might hope that USPTO would from time to time respond to suggestions and feature requests from user groups by implementing requested features or enhancements in Patentcenter. It is this hope that prompted me to carry out a review recently of the Patentcenter feature request list to see what progress USPTO has made. This blog article summarizes my findings. Continue reading “How it is going with feature requests and enhancements for Patentcenter”
Patentcenter is still nominally in beta test, but USPTO seems to be plowing ahead with its plans to force all applicants to e-file patent applications in Microsoft Word format (the Microsoft Word dialect of DOCX) and has long ago stopped any development or feature enhancements for EFS-Web or PAIR. USPTO has said it will shut down EFS-Web and PAIR and users will have no choice but to use Patentcenter to do the things that have in the past been done through EFS-Web and PAIR. So what is the progress at the USPTO with fixing the known bugs in Patentcenter?
There is a Patentcenter beta tester user community, tied together by the Patentcenter listserv. (Interested persons should join that listserv.) A committee from the listserv met last autumn with some USPTO developers and it was hoped that this might lead to some progress with fixing some of the bugs in Patentcenter. It was also hoped that USPTO would listen to users and implement some of the enhancements and features requested by users.
About four months ago, it was explored that the committee might meet again with USPTO people to review the bug list and to see what progress USPTO had been made with the bug list. Some time has passed and the meeting had not yet happened. So to save time, I have prepared this report that summarizes my best assessment of USPTO’s progress with the bug list. Maybe some time soon the meeting will be able to take place and there will be an opportunity for further dialog. In the mean time, this blog article reviews USPTO’s progress in this area. (Preview: things look grim.)
In a subsequent blog article I will review USPTO’s progress with the list of requested feature enhancements for Patentcenter. (Preview: things look grim in that area as well.)
Continue reading “How things are going with bug fixes in USPTO’s Patentcenter”
One category of recurring task in any e-filing system is what might be termed a “follow-on submission” or a “subsequently filed document”. With such a task, you somehow indicate the application number of the application in which you wish to file your document. Clearly one of the most important user interface goals is to help the user avoid an undesired result of inadvertently filing a document in the wrong application. EFS-Web gets this right. WIPO’s ePCT system gets this right. But Patentcenter fails, as may be seen from the screen shot at right. Continue reading “Patentcenter fails to tell you what application you are filing in”
Assume for sake of discussion that a properly worded assignment has been executed and recorded for a US patent application. By this we mean an assignment that indeed settles ownership of of the subject matter of that patent application to the named applicant (typically a corporation or other legal entity that to which the inventors were obligated to assign the invention). Now assume that a continuation or divisional application gets filed pursuant to 35 USC § 120 (in this discussion I do not mean to assume a continuation-in-part). The question posed is:
Is it important, or even necessary, to record the assignment with respect to the child case?
In this blog article I will discuss factors that I can think of that might influence an applicant’s decision as to whether or not to go to the trouble of recording the assignment in the child case. I hope you, dear reader, will consider this question, and I hope you will post a comment below with your thoughts about this. Continue reading “Is it important to record assignments in divisional and continuation cases?”
Every now and then I am astonished to see the USPTO getting something right. Here is an example of the USPTO getting something right — what it amounts to is that I filed a divisional patent application and the USPTO filed for me the IDS that I was getting ready to file. Yes, of course normally when one files a continuation or divisional application, one faces the tedious task of preparing an IDS in the child case to disclose all of the references from the parent case. Here, oversimplifying it slightly, I have a case where the USPTO filed that child-case IDS for me. I won’t have to prepare and file that IDS. You might wonder, what’s going on here? You might wonder, why is the USPTO doing my work for me? If you wonder these things, then read on. Continue reading “USPTO gets it right sometimes — disclosures from parent case”
It can be very difficult to log in at Patentcenter, which is the system that USPTO intends will replace Private PAIR and EFS-Web. Given that USPTO plans to shut down both Private PAIR and EFS-Web in the near future, what follows from this is that the USPTO needs to fix the many design flaws and software bugs in Patentcenter. Many of the flaws and bugs in Patentcenter have been outstanding since its alpha-test launch more than two years ago, and have not been fixed even after more than two years. Today’s blog article talks about a trick that often helps with the login defects in Patentcenter. Continue reading “How to overcome the login defects in Patentcenter”
It’s like trench warfare, trying to get the USPTO to clean up its act on how it handles Powers of Attorney. The war is not over, but one small battle has perhaps moved things forward slightly. Continue reading “Maybe progress in getting the USPTO to handle patent powers of attorney better”
