Bluesky: @oppedahl.com
(An important followup letter got sent on February 14, 2023 to the USPTO — see blog article.)
Readers, I am delighted to be able to report what looks like a bit of progress by the USPTO, away from some of the bad parts of its DOCX initiative. A meeting took place on February 1, 2023 with some representatives of the patent practitioner listserv committee. You can read about the meeting below. Continue reading “Maybe some USPTO progress away from bad parts of its DOCX initiative”
Hello readers. You will recall (blog article of December 27, 2022) that the practitioner community was invited to sign a letter to USPTO Director Vidal. The letter urged her to read the document entitled The Fool’s Errand That Is DOCX, dated December 27, 2022, and the letter urged her to direct her underlings to read that document.
I am honored to be part of a community of eighty-two patent practitioners who signed that letter to Director Vidal.
This blog article reports that the letter did get sent to the USPTO. You can see the letter, which is dated December 28, 2022, here. The USPTO did receive the letter.
The next day, the USPTO blinked and postponed for another three months one of the really bad parts of its DOCX initiative. See Setting and Adjusting Patent Fees During Fiscal Year 2020, 87 Federal Register 80073, published December 29, 2022.
There is reason to think that the USPTO is moving, albeit slowly, toward yet another bit of progress away from really bad parts of its DOCX initiative, in addition to that blink on December 29, 2022. I hope to write another blog article soon about what might be another bit of progress.
Please take a look at the names of the eighty-two signers. Maybe you know some of them. If so, this might be a good time to say “thank you” to them.
The Monaco Industrial Property Office of the Business Development Agency, having joined the DAS system, is now trendy, modern, and up-to-date. (I first reported this to you on December 5, 2022.) Continue reading “Monaco Industrial Property Office is trendy, modern and up-to-date”
The 2022 US utility patent, US design patent, US plant patent, and US trademark registration toteboards are now published. You can see them here:
I am grateful as always to the hundreds of firms that contributed their numbers to these toteboards.
Today is the last day to get in your numbers for the 2022 toteboards. Click here to get in your numbers.
Here is what we have so far:
Get your numbers in. The response forms will stop taking responses at the close of business today, Tuesday, January 24, 2023.
For four years now, the “applications” table in Patentcenter has had a standard column “attorney docket number”. There have been many things wrong with the USPTO’s default design of this “applications” table from the outset, as will be reviewed below. But one of the handful of things that the USPTO did not get wrong in its default design for the “applications” table was that it provided the attorney docket number. Imagine, then, the disappointment in the user community when, on January 16, 2023, the USPTO abruptly eliminated the “attorney docket number” column from the “applications” table. Continue reading “USPTO harmed a Patentcenter screen”
USPTO made a wrong decision just now. Monday morning is absolutely the wrong time to take down Patentcenter for maintenance. Continue reading “Monday morning: Patentcenter down for maintenance!”
I wonder if this language on the USPTO’s Patentcenter web site is bad legal advice? The e-filing system asks “Not ready with complete details for your patent application?” And the answer the USPTO gives is that if you are “not ready with complete details” then what you should file is a provisional patent application. Continue reading “Not ready with complete details for your patent application? file a provisional!”
The 2022 toteboards will get published in February of 2023. Every year, we publish the toteboards, and after that, some firm comes in begging and pleading to hand in its numbers late. Please don’t do that. Please hand in your numbers before Tuesday, January 24, 2023!
As of just now, lots of firms have already handed in their numbers for the 2022 toteboards: Continue reading “Some firms have gotten in their numbers for the 2022 toteboards”
Folks, I have experimented quite a bit in the past 24 hours, trying to figure out a bit more about how to trick the clunky Patent Public Search system into yielding up answers for the 2022 toteboards. Here are my bits of incremental progress on ways to trick the PPS search system into giving you numbers that you might be able to use for the toteboards.
The date search portion of the search. To get patents issuing in calendar 2022, it looks like either of these search strings might work:
@PD>=”20220101″<=20221231
or
“2022”.py.
The latter is a smaller character count and is easier to type without error. Maybe it executes faster in the PPS system.
The application type or patent type portion of the search. To get, say, only utility patents, it looks like this might work:
(b1.AT. or b2.AT.)
This search string tries to get issued US utility patents that did not have a previous publication (B1) merged with issued US utility patents that did have a previous publication (B2).
To get, say, only plant patents, it looks like this might work:
(p2.at. or p3.at.)
This search string tries to get issued US plant patents that did not have a previous publication (P2) merged with issued US plant patents that did have a previous publication (P3).
To get, say, only design patents, it looks like this might work:
s.AT.
Recapping progress thus far. Thus for example if you want to know simply how many utility patents issued in 2022, it looks like this might work:
(b1.AT. or b2.AT.) and “2022”.py.
The answer seems to be 322992 issued utility patents in 2022.
The number of design patents might work with this:
s.AT. and “2022”.py.
The answer seems to be 34158 issued design patents in 2022.
The number of plant patents might work with this:
(p2.AT. or p3.AT.) and “2022”.py.
The answer seems to be 1072 issued plant patents in 2022.
Narrowing it down to the firm name. We can then use any of the previous three search strings along with further field searching to try to narrow the search down to the firm name. The poor documentation for PPS suggests that any of the following might possibly yield legal-representative-specific results:
Within any one of these fields, the hapless searcher might want to try any of several proximity operators: ADJ, ADJ(n), NEAR, NEAR(n), WITH, WITH(n), SAME, or SAME(n). Some searchers will try AND within a field search. Toteboard searchers have tried strings including:
Yes, it looks like you can omit the parentheses because I guess “ADJ” binds more strongly than the field name.
For our firm, the following search strings seemed to work:
The following search strings came up empty:
One firm tried a search like this:
(((“Plinge Patent Law”).firm. OR (“Plinge Patent Law”).inaa. OR (“Plinge Patent Law”).lrag. OR (“Plinge Patent Law”).lrnm. OR (“Plinge Patent Law”).lrfm. )
Part of what the firm was doing, I guess, was trying to get the benefit of any of the search fields that might possibly work (inaa, lrag, and so on). Another part of what the firm was doing, I guess, was to put three words of the firm name into quotation marks, to try to exclude nuisance hits from other firms with somewhat similar firm names.