Category: Patents

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Seventy-four members of the Patentcenter listserv write to the Acting Director of the USPTO

(Update:  more than a year has passed and Mr. Hirshfeld never answered this letter.  See blog article.)

Here you can see a letter that seventy-four members of the Patentcenter listserv sent today to Drew Hirshfeld, the Acting Director of the USPTO.  You can track the priority mail envelope here. The letter makes six “asks”:

  • Direct your Patentcenter developers to identify one or two people from their developer team to subscribe to the Patentcenter listserv to follow the postings. This might sometimes permit those people to pass things along from the listserv to appropriate colleagues on the Patentcenter developer team.
  • Direct your developers to formally adopt the Patentcenter listserv trouble ticket page as a “to do” list for trouble ticket action by the developers.
  • Direct your developers to formally adopt the Patentcenter listserv feature request page as a place for the developers to receive feature requests for Patentcenter.
  • Direct your developers to report back to the people of the Patentcenter listserv each time the developers clear a trouble ticket, referencing the listserv trouble ticket number in the report.
  • Direct your developers to report back to the people of the Patentcenter listserv each time the developers implement a feature request, referencing the listserv feature request number in the report.
  • Direct your developers to cooperate with the people of the Patentcenter listserv by means of some periodic two-way communications by which the progress with trouble tickets and feature requests may be reviewed.
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All USPTO systems are broken – you can’t make this stuff up

click to enlarge

All USPTO systems are broken right now.  They are broken so badly that the USPTO has in desperation authorized filing new patent applications by email and filing new trademark applications by email.  

The USPTO has never in all of the years that I have been in practice taken this profoundly embarrassing step of authorizing e-filing of new patent applications or new trademark applications by email.  

Take a look at my blog article from two days ago where I recounted four times over the span of several years where the “contingency” server for e-filing patent applications had failed at the same time as the main server.  Why?  Because the backup server was in the same room, plugged into the same electrical outlet, connected to the same Internet connection, as the main server.  In the year 2021 you could ask any alert schoolchild how to avoid such a debacle, and the schoolchild would be able to tell you, don’t put them in the same room, don’t plug them into the same electrical outlet, don’t use the same Internet connection for both of them.

The photograph above is a photograph that I used in a blog article from the year 2015, when I tried to shame the USPTO into moving its “contingency” server to a geographically distant location.  That was six years ago.

And now today every external-facing USPTO system is broken.  Every redundant server is broken, just like the main server that it is supposed to be providing a backup for.  And by now the USPTO people are so embarrassed by this that they have violated 37 CFR § 1.8 and 37 CFR § 1.10 by authorizing the filing of new US patent applications by email.  It is ultra vires, but I cannot imagine any patent applicant who needs a filing date today complaining.  Arguably the Director will at some point sign some nunc pro tunc order under 37 CFR § 1.183 waiving all rules retroactively so that every newly filed patent application or trademark application that got filed by email will be given its filing date.

Anyway, let’s all look at the photograph above and ask ourselves what there is about that photograph that nobody at the USPTO was able to understand back in 2015 when I presented the photograph to them in 2015.

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Trap for the unwary effective January 1, 2022 – EPO and USPTO and priority documents

Folks, the USPTO is going to pull the plug on the PDX system on January 1, 2022.  I blogged about this here.  This was in part due to the efforts of The Thirty-One Patent Practitioners.  You can read about the pulling-of-the-plug on the USPTO web site here.  In almost every way this is very good news:

  • You will be able to set a tripwire to let you know the moment the USPTO tries to retrieve the electronic certified copy of the EP priority document.
  • A log will be available to you that keeps a history of the USPTO’s retrieval of the electronic certified copy of the EP priority document.
  • You will be able to independently confirm ahead of time that the electronic certified copy of the EP priority document is indeed available to the USPTO, so as to eliminate any question about the ability of the USPTO say that it supposedly cannot retrieve the electronic certified copy.

But there is one way that this is a potential trap for the unwary, and that is the purpose of this blog article.  You should probably forward this blog article to every patent practitioner that you know who ever files a US patent application that claims priority from an EP patent application.  Continue reading “Trap for the unwary effective January 1, 2022 – EPO and USPTO and priority documents”

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The Thirty-One Patent Practitioners got their third “ask” about DAS

I am sure that many loyal readers of this blog have been following closely the progress of the Commissioner for Patents in following through on the four “asks” about the DAS system that The Thirty-One Patent Practitioners presented in their request letter dated February 22, 2020.  Right?  Of course you have been following this closely.  The good news is that today the Commissioner for Patents moved forward on the third of the “asks”.  The Commissioner has announced that he will pull the plug on the PDX system.  This is good news for patent applicants and patent practitioners, as I will describe, and we all owe a note of thanks to those thirty-one patent practitioners for nudging the Commissioner along on this.  Continue reading “The Thirty-One Patent Practitioners got their third “ask” about DAS”

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A curious Notice of Proposed Rulemaking at the USPTO

I choose to take partial credit, in an odd way, for a curious Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that the USPTO publicized today.  The Notice proposes to change the Rule that defines what filing date you get when you e-file something about patents at the USPTO.  The Rule presently contains some word salad that works out to something like “you get what time it is at the e-filing server in Alexandria, Virginia when you click ‘submit'”.  The proposed new Rule contains some word salad that works out to something like “you get what time it is in the Eastern Time Zone when you click ‘submit'”.  I think my April 1, 2016 blog post, in which I joked that the USPTO had moved its “contingency” patent e-filing server to the Denver patent office, is a partial cause of this Notice.  Continue reading “A curious Notice of Proposed Rulemaking at the USPTO”

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You can sign a letter about Patentcenter to the Acting Director of the USPTO

(Update:  the letter got sent.  See blog article.)

Maybe you have made use of Patentcenter, and have been disappointed with it.  Maybe you have seen the ever-growing list of Patentcenter trouble tickets. Maybe you are aware of the Patentcenter listserv, a group of users of Patentcenter that hopes to help the USPTO with correcting the bugs in Patentcenter.  Maybe you are aware that the USPTO has not been very responsive to repeated efforts by the listserv to set up two-way communications about Patentcenter.

You could help with this by signing a letter to the Acting Director of the USPTO, Drew Hirshfeld.  You can see the letter here.  The letter will close for signatures in two days (Wednesday the 15th) and will get sent on Thursday the 16th.

 

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Cereal box got smaller but price stays the same (USPTO Director’s blog)

35 USC § 153 says:

Patents shall be issued in the name of the United States of America, under the seal of the Patent and Trademark Office, and shall be signed by the Director or have his signature placed thereon and shall be recorded in the Patent and Trademark Office.

For as long as I have been in practice, such patents have arrived in the postal mail approximately every Friday, following the Tuesday of issuance.  We call them “ribbon copies” because on the cover, they have a gold seal and they used to have a representation of a red ribbon.  I review the patents each week, often with some sense of satisfaction at having played some small part in the process of obtaining the patent from the USPTO on behalf of the client.  We then ship each patent to the client, with a cover letter solemnly advising the client that the patent should be kept safely “among the client’s important papers”.

It seems this will come to an end, according to a new article has been posted to the blog of the Director of the USPTO. Continue reading “Cereal box got smaller but price stays the same (USPTO Director’s blog)”

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Webinar recording now available: Picking an International Searching Authority

So you missed the CLE-accredited webinar about the Patent Cooperation Treaty that took place on Wednesday, December 8, 2021 entitled Picking an International Searching Authority?  Well, all is not lost.  You can download the program materials here and you can view the video recording here.  It is unlikely you will ever find anyplace that offers a comparable 86 minutes of discussion of this fascinating topic.  As a reminder this recording is provided free of charge, courtesy of the World Intellectual Property Organization.  You might be able to view it directly in your web browser here:

 

Here is a description:  Continue reading “Webinar recording now available: Picking an International Searching Authority”

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USPTO seems to be of two minds about PDF layers and it wastes everybody’s time

When Adobe started to create the Acrobat PDF standard in 1992, it began as a fairly simple standard.  As the years passed, the PDF standard grew and grew, so that all manner of weird and poorly understood things could be tucked away inside a PDF file.  By now in 2021, a PDF file might contain multimedia content.  It might have a hyperlink to launch a web browser or email client or a VOIP telephone calling client.  It might be “locked” with a password to prevent editing.  It might contain metadata indicating who created or edited the PDF, or the type of software that generated the PDF.  I used to joke that Adobe had a defined datatype for embedding scents in PDF files and then was astonished to learn that this had actually been proposed some years ago in some PDF working group.  I gather that scent embedding in PDFs did not actually get implemented.

In the world of USPTO patent e-filing, the chief way that the inner workings of the PDF standard become challenging is that the programmers at the USPTO profess to be unable to handle certain kinds of “fonts”.  (In a separate blog article I will elaborate on this “font” challenge which is a completely artificial challenge that exists only because the USPTO programmers cause it to exist.)

The other way that the inner workings of the PDF standard are challenging in the world of USPTO patent e-filing is that the programmers at the USPTO (along with their colleagues who draft policy documents and their colleagues who carry out day-to-day work) cannot quite make up their minds about whether “layers” in a PDF file are a problem or not.  And that is the focus of this blog article.  This lack of clarity in the minds of USPTO people leads to wasted time for people at the USPTO and wasted time for patent practitioners and applicants, as I will describe.

Continue reading “USPTO seems to be of two minds about PDF layers and it wastes everybody’s time”

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December 8 – an ideal PCT day!

Wednesday, December 8 will be an ideal day for enthusiasts for the Patent Cooperation Treaty.  Two action-packed events, one after another, both free of charge.

10:30 AM Eastern Time to 1PM Eastern Time.  WIPO’s annual Advanced PCT Seminar.  Topics include:

  • Recent and future developments in the PCT System
  • ePCT: latest and future developments

The prepared materials will conclude at noon Eastern Time, at which time a one-hour Q&A session will provide an opportunity for participants to ask PCT-related questions of WIPO’s panel of PCT experts.

Your presenters are Matthias Reischle-Park, Hanna Kang, Cécile Chatel, and Pascal Piriou.

For more information, or to register, click here.

2PM Eastern Time to 3:40 PM Eastern Time.  Picking an International Searching Authority.   A PCT filer from the US has eight International Searching Authorities to choose from:

  • Australian Patent Office (ISA/AU)
  • European Patent Office (ISA/EP)
  • Israel patent office (ISA/IL)
  • Japanese Patent Office (ISA/JP)
  • Korean Intellectual Property Office (ISA/KR)
  • Russian patent office (ISA/RU)
  • Singapore patent office (ISA/SG)
  • United States Patent and Trademark Office (ISA/US)

Is there some particular ISA among these eight ISAs that is always or nearly always the best choice for nearly all PCT filers?  (The answer is no!)

What are the advantages and disadvantages of these various International Searching Authorities?   What are aspects of a particular patent application that might make a big difference to an applicant in the applicant’s process of selecting an ISA?

As a bonus topic we will talk about ways that power users can use ePCT to communicate with ISAs, and we will talk about ways to transfer funds to ISAs.  We will also discuss the likely futility of trying to get the ISA to agree to let you hand in formal drawings after you have made the mistake of filing your PCT application with informal drawings.

Your presenter is Carl Oppedahl.

The event is free of charge, because of generous support from WIPO.  For more information, or to register, click here.