With no advance warning whatsoever, on the scheduled date for USPTO’s shutdown of EPAS and ETAS, and the scheduled launch of the successor system for recordation of assignments, USPTO has quietly announced a third postponement of the migration.
Here is a recap of the USPTO announcements about its shutdown of EPAS and ETAS, and its launch of its successor assignment recordation system.
On October 31, 2023, the USPTO originally said that its migration from EPAS and ETAS to a successor system would happen on Monday, December 4, 2023 (screen shot at right and blog article).
First postponement. On November 9, 2023, the USPTO quietly announced that it was postponing the migration date from Monday, December 4, 2023 to Monday, January 15, 2024 (a delay of six weeks). (Screen shot at right and blog article.)
Second postponement. On Thursday, January 11, 2024, with four days to go before the scheduled migration, the USPTO announced that it was postponing the migration date from Monday, January 15, 2024 to Monday, January 22, 2024 (a delay of a week). (Screen shot at right, and blog article.)
Postponement accelerated. On Tuesday, January 16, 2024, the USPTO announced that instead of doing the shutdown-and-launch on January 22, 2024 (six days hence), the USPTO would accelerate the shutdown-and-launch by three days, to Friday, January 19, 2024. Here is the USPTO’s stated plan for Friday, January 19:
The USPTO Certified Copy and Assignments (CC&A) Product team will replace the EPAS and ETAS systems with IPAS (Assignment Center), from 9 a.m. until 11 p.m. on Friday, January 19 ET.
(See screen shot above right.) In the past, the USPTO has often scheduled system shutdowns for times that are outside of the usual business day, for example shortly after midnight on a business day or on weekends. But this stated plan would have left USPTO’s customers unable to carry out recordations at all for the entirety of the business day on Friday, January 19.
It will be recalled that the precise date of recordation of a patent or trademark assignment an assignment recordation is sometimes extremely important. See 35 USC § 261 (patents) and 15 USC § 1060 (trademarks) which give rise to fact patterns in which a delay of a single day in the recordation of an assignment can be outcome-determinative as to who exactly is the owner of a patent or a trademark registration. This aspect of federal law doubtless prompted urgent scrambling for some USPTO customers to plan for a recordation of a particular assignment to be carried out in the wee hours of the morning, prior to 9AM Eastern Time on Friday, January 19.
Third postponement. The date of the scheduled shutdown (Friday, January 19, 2024) arrived, and the time of the scheduled shutdown (9AM Eastern Time) arrived, and there was no shutdown. 10AM passed, and 11AM passed, and noon passed, and 1PM passed, and still the scheduled shutdown did not happen. It was at 1:57 PM on Friday, January 19, that the USPTO acknowledged that the shutdown scheduled for almost five hours earlier had not taken place. With advance warning of about negative five hours, the USPTO said that it would postpone the January 19 shutdown by seventeen days, to Monday, February 5, 2024. (USPTO web page, archived here.)
The January 19 announcement is breathtaking for its disingenousness. The announcement says:
We are postponing the original transition date (previously January 22) to incorporate valuable additional stakeholder feedback into the system …
A first disingenuousness is to say that the January 22 transition date was “the original transition date”. As recounted above, the true “original transition date” was December 4, 2023. And then the transition date was January 15, 2024. And then the transition date was January 22, 2024. And then the transition date was backed up to January 19, 2024.
A second disingenuousness is to pretend that three days’ advance notice was being given. The January 19 announcement (at 1:57 PM Eastern Time) makes it sound as though the shutdown was scheduled for three days hence (January 22) when the truth is the shutdown was scheduled for nearly five hours earlier (at 9AM Eastern Time the same day).
A third disingenuousness is to pretend that there had ever been any stakeholder feedback at all. The paying customers of the USPTO have been given no opportunity whatsoever to provide any feedback on the to-be-launched system. From the date of the initial announcement (October 31, 2023) until now, the USPTO has not beta-tested the system with any actual customers. From the date of the initial announcement (October 31, 2023) until now, the USPTO has not even revealed screen shots or mockups of the system to any actual customers. The USPTO says there will be “informational resources, how-to guides, and training materials” for the new system, but has not shown any of the informational resources, how-to guides, or training materials to actual customers. It is not at all clear who the “stakeholders” are who have supposedly been given an opportunity to provide “feedback”.
On November 12, 2023 (blog article) the user community:
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- invited the USPTO to ask users what features they are looking for in the new assignment recordation system;
- invited the USPTO to ask users what, if anything, was supposedly wrong about EPAS or ETAS that needed fixing;
- invited the USPTO to commit that all of the functionalities of the EPAS/ETAS systems would be carried forward into the new system;
- invited the USPTO to do customer beta testing;
- invited the USPTO to reveal (with screen shots or mock-ups) what the new system would look like;
- volunteered to provide users from the Patent Center and E-Trademarks listservs to assist the USPTO in its planning, development, and testing of the new system.
In the two months since then, the USPTO has not done any of these things. This makes it seem likely that the USPTO will not do any of these things in the next two weeks. It appears that the shutdown of EPAS and ETAS, and the launch of the successor system, will take place on Monday, February 5, 2024 with no “feedback” whatsoever from customer “stakeholders”.
You wrote “disingenuousness”, but I think it’s pronounced “lie”.
“It appears that the shutdown of EPAS and ETAS, and the launch of the successor system, will take place on Monday, February 5, 2024, OR “customers” will be notified of yet another date change sometime around then,…” FIFY
I assume SteamPunk is also handling this, is that right?
Training videos posted:
https://www.uspto.gov/learning-and-resources/assignment-center-tutorial-videos?utm_campaign=subscriptioncenter&utm_content=&utm_medium=email&utm_name=&utm_source=govdelivery&utm_term=
What I didn’t see was whether the new system allows for “saved submissions” like you can do with the old system. Usually staff enters and double-checks, and the attorney has the final say in approving. The training video goes straight to signing and submitting without showing the ability to “save” a draft submission.