Category: Patents

USPTO has had another system crash.  EFS-Web is broken again.  It crashed at about 6AM this morning, Saturday, August 9.

Practitioners will recall the big USPTO system crash on Wednesday, May 14 (blog) in which EFS-Web was broken but also EFS-Web Contingency was broken.

In today’s system crash, EFS-Web is broken but EFS-Web Contingency is still working.  So today’s crash at the USPTO is not quite as bad as the May 14 crash.

The USPTO maintains a USPTO Systems Status and Availability page which supposedly provides “the latest information on operating status and availability of Online Business Systems.”  The USPTO failed that promise again today.  At no time during this six-hour outage did the SSAA page give any acknowledgement that EFS-Web had crashed.

What are the workarounds when EFS-Web crashes like this?

Continue reading “EFS-Web broken again”

I expect that some readers of this blog have made use of QPIDS, the Quick Path Information Disclosure Statement system.  The goal of QPIDS is to reduce the number of times that an applicant has to pay an RCE fee to get an IDS considered.  Unfortunately in recent times USPTO has been mishandling the QPIDS system.  The result is that often an applicant is stuck paying even more money than the applicant would have had to pay if the applicant had simply filed an RCE instead of a QPIDS.

Continue reading “USPTO mishandling QPIDS”

Most readers of this blog were affected one way or another by USPTO’s total crash of all patent-related e-commerce systems on Wednesday, May 14.  I blogged about the crash here and here.  I faxed a letter to Acting Director Lee on May 17 about the crash.  In my letter, among other things I asked her to do whatever was necessary to waive the $400 penalty that would normally be imposed on a filer that failed to e-file on May 14 and instead was forced by USPTO’s crash to file by postal service or by hand carry to the USPTO.

More than a month came and went, with no word from Acting Director Lee in response to my faxed letter.  This despite my having telephoned Acting Director Lee’s office once a week or so since May 17, asking if someone could at least confirm receipt of the fax and maybe tell me who had been given the task of responding to the fax.

A few days ago I decided to work out how exactly Acting Director Lee could accomplish the waiver of the penalty. Continue reading “More on USPTO’s total system crash on May 14”

USPTO imposes a $400 penalty on those who paper-file a patent application instead of e-filing it.  The policy reason is, of course, to make people e-file.  But USPTO’s e-filing system had a total crash (blog post) on Wednesday, May 14, that made it impossible for USPTO customers to e-file their patent applications.  This forced customers to paper-file (for example by going to the Post Office).

The right thing, of course, would be for USPTO to waive the $400 penalty for filings carried out on May 14.  But no …

Continue reading “USPTO misses a chance to do the right thing about its May 14 system crash”

Regular users of USPTO’s Private PAIR and EFS-Web systems are reminded several times a day that the only way that they make use of the systems is by permitting a computer program called the Entrust java applet to run on their computer.

But the Java system will block the Entrust applet in a future Java security update.  (See warning at right.)

Here is what USPTO should do …

Continue reading “A reminder that USPTO needs to scrap the Entrust java applet for PAIR and EFS-Web”