I was paying an Issue Fee in Patent Center, I clicked “submit”, and at right you can see what happened next. “There was an error”.
That’s it. The developers of Patent Center want me to know that “There was an error.”
Well, now I know. There was an error.
What really deserves comment here is the state of mind of the developers when they designed this error message. Somebody somewhere at the USPTO, when they were coding this line of code, said “well, I guess I need to choose the text of this error message.” And this person decided that the way to explain what had gone wrong was to use these four words.
You could ask a twelve-year-old child “is this an acceptable error message?” and the child would say “no it is not”. Continue reading “USPTO’s Patent Center says: “There was an error””
On March 22, 2024 the USPTO published a Federal Register Notice saying that the USPTO would start accepting electronic signatures generated by some commercial e-signature platforms without any requirement that virgules (forward slashes) be incorporated into the e-signature. You can see, at right, an e-signature generated by one particular commercial e-signature platform. If you were to e-file the document quoted at right, would the USPTO bounce it or accept it? In this blog article I discuss in detail the various USPTO communications to try to work out the answer. Spoiler alert — it turns out to be impossible to know what the USPTO will and will not accept. Bigger spoiler alert — one assumes that TYFNIL this will be a fertile area for summary judgment practice and the like. 
Thanks to John L. Welch’s hundreds of blog articles about 2d refusals, I have gotten to the point where sometimes I can guess correctly the outcome of an ex parte appeal of a 2d refusal. The alert reader might ask:
CNN launched on June 1, 1980. Only now, 45 years later, has CNN become available “