(This has still not been fixed as of June 10. I phoned the EBC to open another trouble ticket. The new ticket number is 1-696205867.)
I was quite surprised today to be reminded that a defect in Patentcenter that I had reported to the USPTO back in December of 2019 has still not been corrected. The defect is that it is impossible, in Patentcenter, to e-file any follow-on submission in any 35-series design patent application. You can see this in the screen shot at right. Continue reading “Patentcenter is broken for Hague cases”
(Update: I watered down the “ask” as you can see at the end of the blog post.)
Everybody in every intellectual property office provides permalinks. Everybody except the PAIR developers at USPTO, that is. This is USPTO’s chance to be in harmony with everybody else and provide permalinks in Patentcenter, as I will explain. Continue reading “Patentcenter feature request: permalinks”
Private PAIR has a feature in “Search by Customer Number” called “Applications with Status Changes”. You can see it quoted at right. The feature is extremely helpful. Every night, shortly past midnight, I use this feature to check for cases in my firm’s portfolio that have had recent status changes. It helps us serve our clients better.
And Patentcenter lacks this feature. I reported this need to the USPTO back in September of 2018 (see article).
You can sort of fumble around in Patentcenter and try to find similar information. You can go into your “workbench” and sort on “status date”. And then you can click on an application of interest, and look around it in that application to see what the status change is about, report it to the client and so on. But then when you are done, Patentcenter will have lost everything about what you were doing. You will have to go back to your workbench again, and sort on “status date” again, and then try to figure out where in the resulting list you had been, to figure out which case to look at next.
USPTO has said many times that one of its goals is to provide, in Patentcenter, each of the user features that is provided in Private PAIR and in EFS-Web. Part of fulfilling that goal would be to provide this “Applications with Status Changes” feature in Patentcenter, just as in Private PAIR.
(Update: it looks like this feature is imminent. See blog article.)
EFS-Web has the feature “View last 40 eFiling Acknowledgement Receipts”. Patentcenter needs to have this same feature. I pointed this out to the USPTO in September of 2018 as an alpha tester of Patentcenter.
One of the things that I always do after I have e-filed something in Patentcenter is to go and look in IFW to see just what USPTO received from me. I want to check it to make sure I filed what I meant to file. I want to make sure that the PDF image did not get degraded or converted to a blank page (as occasionally happens). And in most cases I want to download what the USPTO received from me and send it to the client so that the client can see exactly what the USPTO received.
This requires copying an application number and doing multiple mouse clicks, and eventually reaching a screen where I can paste in the application number and then click some more to get to IFW. And only then am I able to see what the USPTO received from me in the e-filing.
So here’s the feature request. On the “success” page where Patentcenter says I have successfully e-filed something, can there please be a “deep link” that goes directly to the IFW screen for the particular patent application in which I just e-filed something?
I could then for example right-click on it and open a new page and I could see what the USPTO received from me.
One of the reasons why filers need to start learning to use ePCT (if they have not done so already) is that some day PCT-SAFE will be gone. Yesterday, PCT-SAFE took one more step towards oblivion. Continue reading “PCT-SAFE — one more step towards oblivion”
Those who regularly use EFS-Web and Private PAIR need to be joining the beta-testers of Patentcenter. You need to do this because eventually USPTO will shut down EFS-Web and Private PAIR. You need to find the bugs in Patentcenter and you need to figure out what features need to be requested in Patentcenter. To this end you should probably join the Patentcenter listserv. And to this end I have set up two very simple pages:
If you find a bug in Patentcenter that you think needs to be listed on the trouble tickets page, join the listserv and bring it up there. Members of the listserv can then add it to the trouble ticket page. Similarly if you think of a feature that needs to be added to Patentcenter, bring it up in the listserv and we can then add it to the feature requests page.
(Update May 12, 2020: now it is broken only two ways. The initial cap for the city name has been fixed.)
USPTO will eventually shut down EFS-Web and the only patent e-filing system available to applicants will be Patentcenter. So it behooves all of us to take the present opportunity to beta-test Patentcenter as fully as we can, to try to get USPTO to fix its defects and to try to get USPTO to make it user-friendly. (Probably this means you should join the Patentcenter listserv.) Here is a defect that I keep running into in Patentcenter, namely that the web-based Form 85B drops the initial capitalization for the city name for the assignee. I reported this to the USPTO a year ago and it has still not been fixed. But there are two other ways that this feature of Patentcenter is broken. Continue reading “Patentcenter web-based Form 85B is broken three ways”
(Update. The developers quietly removed this feature from Patentcenter on about May 10. See blog article.)
One of the features of EFS-Web is the web-based Corrected ADS (quoted at right). You enter an application number and confirmation number and EFS-Web will construct for you a Corrected ADS with strikethroughs and underscores compliant with 37 CFR § 1.76.
click to enlarge
Patentcenter has a corresponding function (quoted at right). But this Patentcenter function is broken — it loses things and does not tell you that it lost them. (There are also two other broken things about the Patentcenter Corrected ADS function as I will discuss below.) Until USPTO fixes the software, you need to be extremely cautious if you decide to try using the Corrected ADS function in Patentcenter. I will discuss it now in more detail, with some background from EFS-Web as well. Continue reading “Patentcenter Corrected ADS is broken in at least three ways”
