Category: Patents

Well, if you want any confirmation as to who is running the USPTO now, you have it.  Coke Morgan Stewart was sworn in shortly after the Trump inauguration yesterday, and just nineteen hours later, the usual round of Tuesday patent issuances took place, and her signature was on those patents.

In contrast, it looks as though none of the US trademarks that got registered today actually have registration certificates.  I imagine there was some flurry of activity at the USPTO yesterday to yank all of the to-be-mailed registration certificates with Derrick Brent’s signature on them, and right now there is some further flurry of activity to (a) generate fresh registration certificates and (b) get them cryptographically signed.

A month ago, former USPTO Director Kathi Vidal departed from the USPTO.

Some days ago, apparently Acting Director Derrick Brent quietly departed from the USPTO.

It seems that a few minutes after the inauguration of Donald Trump, on a day when the USPTO was closed due to federal holiday, a new Acting Director got sworn in at the USPTO.  It seems that the new Acting Director is a Coke Morgan Stewart.  You can read about her here, in an official bio that got posted on a day when the USPTO was closed due to federal holiday.

Conspicuously absent from her official bio at the USPTO is a mention of any technical background.  According to the USPTO’s Find a patent practitioner, she lacks a registration number.   My guess is that she has never written a patent application or prosecuted a US patent to issuance.  I would welcome the opportunity to be shown wrong about this.

In an earlier blog article I highlighted the profound inadequacy of the user documentation for USPTO’s Patent Public Search system.  Here is yet another example of this inadequacy.  In the screen shot above I quote, in its entirety, the USPTO’s user documentation for the search field “ASTC”.  I defy any public user of USPTO’s Patent Public Search system to make any sense of this inadequate documentation.  What, pray tell, do you get if the “assignee type” that you search for is “02”?  What other numerical values can be searched for, and what do they mean?  Continue reading “How to use “assignee type code” in Patent Public Search?”

Each year, US patent practitioners need to count up how many patents they obtained for clients in the previous year, for submission to the toteboards.   What naturally comes to mind is the idea that maybe the USPTO’s Patent Public Search would permit a practitioner to get the answer.  But USPTO’s Patent Public Search has, objectively, the worst search user interface that one could devise.  Scroll to the end to see how you might use Patent Public Search to get your numbers for the toteboards.

Continue reading “Extracting toteboard numbers from USPTO’s “Patent Public Search””