Category: Patents

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.

• • Countdown to the shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web (October 26)
  • Daylight saving time and WIPO (October 29)
  • What happens when USPTO fails to answer letters or respond to emails or return telephone calls about Patent Center (October 31)
  • AIPLA again asks USPTO to postpone the shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web (October 31)
  • The in-person meeting at the USPTO on October 18 about Patent Center (October 31)
  • Detailed review of USPTO’s 18-slide deck about Patent Center (October 31)
  • AIPLA and 123 Patent Practitioners each file a comment to OMB about USPTO’s DOCX initiative (October 31)
  • Argentina intellectual property office becomes even more trendy, modern and up-to-date (November 1)
  • NAPP writes to the USPTO about Patent Center not being ready (November 2)

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”

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”

Here is a report about the face-to-face October 18, 2023 meeting with USPTO people about Patent Center.  Continue reading “The in-person meeting at the USPTO on October 18 about Patent Center”

Yesterday the AIPLA wrote a letter to the USPTO, reiterating its earlier request that the USPTO postpone its shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web from the presently scheduled date of November 8, 2023.  You can see the letter here.  Attached to AIPLA’s letter was an extra copy of AIPLA’s July 28, 2023 slide presentation.  Continue reading “AIPLA again asks USPTO to postpone the shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web”

In a previous blog article I recounted some of the many times that the patent community has sent letters to the USPTO leadership about Patent Center that have gone unanswered, and has sent emails to the USPTO leadership about Patent Center that have gone without response, and has left telephone messages to the USPTO leadership about Patent Center that were never returned.  What happens next, I asked.  Here are three things that have happened since then, to try to bring about some change at the USPTO about Patent Center:

• A first letter got sent on September 29, 2023 from One Hundred Seventy-Eight Members of the Patent Center Listserv to the Inspector General at the Department of Commerce.  This became the Inspector General’s complaint number 23-0900.  The Inspector General wrote:

  The IG has requested that management officials at the USPTO conduct a thorough and independent inquiry and provide a response to the IG, including a detailed explanation of their review process and any corrective action, if any, they take as a result.

• A letter got sent on October 9, 2023 from  137 intellectual property professionals to the Office of Management and Budget, invoking OMB’s responsibility to oversee the data-collection aspects of Patent Center.  It is discussed here.
• A second letter got sent on October 15, 2023 from PTAARMIGAN to the Inspector General at the Department of Commerce.  This became the Inspector General’s complaint number 24-0055.  The Inspector General wrote:

  After careful consideration, we decided to refer your allegations(s) [sic] to management officials at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and requested that they merge this complaint with another related matter. We have requested that they conduct a thorough and independent inquiry and provide a response to us, including a detailed explanation of their review process and any corrective action, if any, they take as a result.

The USPTO says it will shut down PAIR and EFS-Web on November 8, 2023. Here is a countdown timer for the shutdown.

(Update:  we wrote to Commissioner for Patents Udupa about the open-or-closed status of these fifteen EBC tickets on October 12, 2023 (see email).  We have sent a followup letter to the Commissioner and hopefully we will hear back from her.)

The USPTO claims to listen to users who report bugs in Patent Center.  The USPTO says that one of the ways that a user can report a bug in Patent Center is to open a trouble ticket with the Electronic Business Center.

Here are fifteen EBC trouble tickets which users of Patent Center opened, reporting bugs in Patent Center.  In this table, each EBC ticket number is listed along with the corresponding CP ticket number on the Patent Center trouble ticket list, and along with the date of creation of the trouble ticket.

The USPTO is disingenuous when it pretends that reporting Patent Center bugs to the EBC supposedly works.  Never, not even once, has any Patent Center user who opened a trouble ticket about Patent Center with the EBC ever heard back from the EBC with any progress or resolution for the bug that was being reported.  The USPTO never got back to any of these fifteen Patent Center users.

EBC ticket number	CP ticket number	creation date
1-690814254	CP16	May 4, 2020
1-695641646	CP30	June 8, 2020
1-701563481	CP33	July 5, 2020
1-761431662	CP55	June 14, 2021
1-761431662	CP56	June 14, 2021
1-823950504	CP63	October 22, 2021
1-839307926	CP69	December 3, 2021
1-783509075	CP71	December 8, 2021
1-826155667	CP103	March 13, 2023
1-827293068	CP127	March 28, 2023
1-828414131	CP135	March 30, 2023
1-830635911	CP139	May 18, 2023
1-831159389	CP140	May 25, 2023
1-831173674	CP141	May 25, 2023
1-838522518	CP148	August 29, 2023
1-836237428	CP160	September 30, 2023