Author: Carl

In my early days of amateur radio (call sign AA2KW) the way I knew how much current was flowing in a circuit was by looking at a needle in a d’Arsonval meter.  With the meter at right, with the needle as shown you could fairly confidently say the current is 9.6 amperes.  But with this kind of meter if the current got too big, the needle would bump against a “peg”.  We would say “the meter is pegged” as a shorthand way of saying “the current is so big that it exceeds the range of the meter”.  With the meter at right if the needle were at “10”, a person who did not know how mechanical meters worked might mistakenly conclude that the current was in fact 10 amperes.  The real situation was that there was a “peg” to keep the needle from swinging further to the right.  If the needle happens to be at “10”, the true value might be 12 amps or 20 amps or more.

Which brings us to the point of today’s blog posting.  USPTO publishes statistics as to the backlogs for particular art units.  In Private PAIR, you can see the backlog for a specific one of your pending files, communicated as a “First Office Action Predication” based upon when your application was filed and which art unit you are in.  The FOAP tells you how many months from now that particular application is likely to receive its first Office Action.  USPTO also publishes general statistics for each art unit.  Recently I wrote about backlogs in the design art units.  Now I am going to say a few words about the utility art units with the biggest backlogs including the art units that are “pegged”.

Continue reading ““Pegged”, or, which utility art units have biggest backlogs?”

(Followup postings here and here and here and here.)

USPTO’s internal standard for deciding PPH petitions is to try to attend to each petition with two months of when it was filed.  But the Office is falling behind.  What can you do?

The last time I asked USPTO about this kind of backlog, which was about two years ago, the Office cheerfully explained that if you want your PPH petition decided promptly, you can file a second petition.  This second petition is a petition under Rule 182, with a fee of $400 (smaller for small or micro entities), to ask that the PPH petition be decided promptly.

Anyway after we filed half a dozen of these $400 petitions, USPTO somehow allocated enough resources to the problem that PPH petitions were again being attended to promptly.  That was a couple of years ago.  But now USPTO has fallen behind again.

It sort of misses the point of PPH if USPTO fails to take up the PPH petitions promptly, seems to me.

Continue reading “USPTO falling behind in deciding PPH petitions”