Will the USPTO cut deep grooves in the airport runways?

When the City of Denver sold the bonds that would pay for the construction of Denver International Airport (to replace Stapleton airport), there was language in the bonds that imposed a contractual obligation:  on the day that DIA was placed into service, deep grooves would be cut into each of the runways at Stapleton.  Continue reading “Will the USPTO cut deep grooves in the airport runways?”

NAPP will meet with USPTO people on Monday about Patent Center

Update:  the meeting took place (blog article).

The USPTO’s planned shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web will be this coming Tuesday, November 7 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time (see countdown clock).  The National Association of Patent Practitioners (NAPP) wrote a letter to USPTO Director Kathi Vidal on October 31, 2023 (blog article), asking the USPTO to postpone the shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web.  In response to this letter, Commissioner for Patents Vaishali Udupa has invited NAPP to meet with her and her colleagues about Patent Center on Monday, November 6.  Others attending from the USPTO will be Deputy Commissioner for Patent Administration Richard Seidel, Richard Fernandez, and Tony Uranga.  Attending on behalf of NAPP will be its president, Rich Baker, and its vice president, Dan Smith.  The meeting will take place at 11AM Eastern Time.

It will be fascinating to hear about the results of the meeting.

USPTO leadership will, I predict, take corrective action

(Update:  USPTO leadership has, indeed, taken corrective action (blog article).)

It crosses my mind that this kind of thing with the EBC telling people that Patent Center is not ready (see blog article) will very likely lead to a corrective action by USPTO leadership. No, I do not mean that USPTO leadership will postpone the shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web (now planned for November 8) until Patent Center is “ready”. Nor do I mean that USPTO leadership will actually do the hard work of making Patent Center “ready” between now and November 8. I mean that a memo will get circulated to the representatives at the EBC, telling them that between now and November 8, no user is to be told that the workaround for a Patent Center bug is to “use PAIR instead” or “use EFS-Web instead”.

EBC even now tells users to use EFS-Web as workaround for Patent Center bugs

Okay, folks, let’s try to figure out if Patent Center is actually “ready” so that the USPTO can shut down PAIR and EFS-Web.  The USPTO decisionmakers have made it very clear that the views of actual USPTO customers (many of whom say the answer is “no”) are not to be credited on this point.    But suppose there were an actual USPTO employee who communicates, by the employee’s own words and actions, that they do not think Patent Center is “ready”.  Would that be enough to convince the USPTO decisionmakers otherwise?

On October 31, 2023, USPTO customer Victoria O’Conner was trying to file a PCT application in Patent Center.  But Patent Center stopped working at the fee payment selection page.  So she called the EBC.  The EBC representative said “use EFS-Web instead”.    This was EBC ticket number 1-842304670.  This is also CP ticket number CP176.

Welcome back to blog subscribers

Hello readers!  The server that hosts this blog got hacked on October 18, during the time that I was in Washington DC for the face-to-face meeting (blog article) with USPTO people on the topic of Patent Center.  When I returned to home after these travels, I set to work dealing with the hack.  The recovery plan that I eventually arrived at was to set up a new hosting server with the plan of shutting down the old hosting server.  It was quite a lot of work to migrate all of the systems that had been on the old server, over to the new server, keeping in mind that it was very important to be extremely careful to ensure that the only stuff to be be migrated from the old server was content and not any executable code.  It meant that every instance of executable code needed to be rebuilt from scratch, from trusted sources.  And a number of new and additional protective measures needed to be in place on the new server.  And everything needed to be tested.

The way that this affects you, dear reader, is that if you are one of the thousands of subscribers to this blog, you did not get notified by email of any new blog posts after October 18.  It was just today that I successfully migrated the subscriber list over from the old (compromised) server to the new server.  So it is only today that you, as a subscriber, will resume being notified by email of new blog posts.

And this means that you did not get notified of the following nine blog posts that happened after October 18.  So here is a blog post to identify the blog posts that you did not get notified about.

NAPP writes to the USPTO about Patent Center not being ready

Update:  NAPP will meet with USPTO about this on November 6 (blog article).  The meeting took place (blog article).   

At this page you can see the countdown until the USPTO says it will shut down PAIR and EFS-Web.  As of today, that day is 5 days away.  And yet another professional association, the National Association of Patent Practitioners, has told the USPTO that it does not think Patent Center is ready.  Continue reading “NAPP writes to the USPTO about Patent Center not being ready”

AIPLA and 123 Patent Practitioners each file a comment to OMB about USPTO’s DOCX initiative

It will be recalled that there was an opportunity to help the Office of Management and Budget appreciate the problems with USPTO’s plans to charge a $400 penalty for those who fail to file their patent applications in Microsoft Word format.   This opportunity appeared in a Federal Register notice dated September 27, 2023 (88 FR 66414).  It established a due date of October 27, 2023 for public comment.

I was honored to be among the signers of a comment letter from One Hundred Twenty-Three Patent Professionals dated October 27, 2023.  This was a lot of work for David Boundy, to whom the patent community is thankful.  You can see the letter here and it is archived here.

I am delighted to see that AIPLA has also filed a comment on this.   You can see the letter, which is dated October 27, 2023, here and it is archived here.

It will be very interesting to see what, if anything, the Office of Management and Budget decides about this DOCX issue.

Detailed review of USPTO’s 18-slide deck about Patent Center

As described in this report, a face-to-face meeting took place on October 18, 2023 between representatives of the Patent Center listserv and Commissioner for Patents Vaishali Udupa and her Patent Center staff.   At the start of the meeting, Commissioner Udupa started to present an 18-slide deck which we had never seen before.  You can see the slide deck here.  Slides 3 through 18 have one CP trouble ticket on each slide, meaning that sixteen CP trouble tickets are shown, one per slide.   This blog article discusses each of the sixteen trouble tickets in detail.  Continue reading “Detailed review of USPTO’s 18-slide deck about Patent Center”