Still concerned about DOCX?

(Update:  it is time for you, dear reader to consider signing another letter.  See blog posting.)

A colleague today noted that by now more than a month has passed since the last time I griped about USPTO’s DOCX activities in this blog.  He wondered if perhaps my silence was an indication that I feel the USPTO people have somehow addressed my concerns about the DOCX situation.

Just so that there is no risk of any misunderstanding about this, no, it is not the case that anything that anyone at the USPTO has done has alleviated in any way my concerns about USPTO’s DOCX plans. Continue reading “Still concerned about DOCX?”

Monday, May 25 is a holiday at the USPTO

Monday, Monday, 25, 2020 will be a federal holiday in the District of Columbia.  This means the USPTO will be closed.  This means that any action that would be due at the USPTO on May 25 will be timely if it is done by Tuesday, May 26, 2020.

USPTO clears two Patentcenter trouble tickets

Quite by accident today I stumbled upon the good news that USPTO fixed two bugs in Patentcenter, permitting us to clear two Patentcenter trouble tickets today.  The cleared trouble tickets are:

  • CP1 — Web-based Form 85B loses initial capitalization for assignee city name (see article)
  • CP8 – Reel number displayed wrong (see article

The trouble ticket page has been updated accordingly.  This leaves twenty-one outstanding trouble tickets.

Of course what we can hope for is that eventually the Patentcenter developers will establish an outbound communications channel with the beta testing community, and will let us know when they fix a bug or add a requested feature.  Until then, it will be a matter of our stumbling upon the fact of a bug having been fixed or a desirable feature having been added.

 

Spurious “user is not enrolled” error in Patentcenter

click to enlarge

Patentcenter incorrectly lists every user as “not enrolled”.  Patentcenter incorrectly says that every user “cannot access customer number in Patent Center and PAIR.”

To see this, log in at Patentcenter, click on “Manage”, click on “Manage customer numbers”.  Then click on any customer number in your list.  You will see that every user is flagged as being “not enrolled”.

This is bug report CP33.

EPO is still missing from Patentcenter Web-based ADS

click to enlarge

Six months have now passed since I first reported this problem to the EBC.  Still it has not been fixed.  EPO is missing from the Web-based ADS function in Patentcenter!

EPO is in the web-based ADS function in EFS-Web.   But it is missing in the corresponding function in Patentcenter.  This is bug report CP9 and you can read about it here.

This would be so very easy to fix.  It would be a matter of adding one line of text in a list item on a web page.  

 

How many 371 cases have been filed thus far in Patentcenter?

click to enlarge

US national phase entries in Patentcenter are assigned from a block of application numbers starting at 15/733,001.  Our firm was the third ever to file a 371 case in Patentcenter, receiving application number 15/733,003.

By the end of 2019, there had been fifteen 371 cases filed.  My firm had filed seven of those cases.  Yes my firm had done about half of all of the US national-phase work in Patentcenter from the beginnings of alpha test until the end of 2019.

By now, with Patentcenter opening up for general use, there has been an uptick in national-phase filings in Patentcenter.  Twenty of them have been filed just in the past eight days.