Category: Patents

Well, we are going into our fifth hour of EFS-Web and PAIR being broken at the USPTO.  When a customer tries to get into EFS-Web, the very disappointing situation is that this message shows up on the USPTO web site:

EFS-Web and EFS-Web Contingency are unavailable.

The system status page on the USPTO web site says:

The USPTO is performing emergency maintenance on multiple systems which began at 12:01 a.m., Wednesday, August 15 and is expected to be completed by 5:30 a.m., Thursday, August 16 ET.

On a practical level this means that it may well turn out that it is impossible to get a same-day filing date at the USPTO for filing of new patent applications today.

Of course you can go down to the post office and file by means of Priority Mail Express.  But then USPTO will ding you with a $400 penalty for failing to e-file.

This situation is unacceptable.

Keep in mind that if the thing that you need to do is filing a PCT application, you have about another hour and half during which you could file it at RO/IB.  You don’t necessarily have to use RO/US as your way of filing a PCT application.

More than two years ago (on April 1, 2016) I explained (blog post) what USPTO did (or rather, should have done) to guard against this kind of failure.  Unfortunately it seems that even now in 2018, USPTO permits all too many single points of failure that can lead to the main EFS-Web server and the contingency EFS-Web server to both be broken at the same time.  It’s as though both e-filing servers were plugged into the same extension cord, and through a bit of bad luck somebody tripped over the extension cord and unplugged it.

Earlier today I dropped emails to several of the people at the USPTO who are in charge of these systems.  One by one, each of these people sent me an automated “vacation” email.  Here are some of the vacation messages:

• I am out of the office and will return 8/17.
• I am currently out of the office and will return on 8/20.
• I’m currently out of the office and will return on Thursday (8/23).

The Denver patent office (which is quite nearby to our firm’s Broomfield office) has been open for a couple of years now.

Finally yesterday we had an opportunity to do something for the first time that we had been waiting for for a very long time.  We got to conduct an in-person interview with a patent examiner in the Denver patent office!

Yes, one of our pending patent applications got assigned to an Examiner who is a teleworker located here in Colorado.  And so this happy bit of luck made it possible to conduct this interview.

Oh, and for what it’s worth I am delighted to be able to report that we were able to reach agreement with the Examiner.  We will soon receive an Examiner’s Amendment and Notice of Allowance, all in the first Office Action.  The client is delighted at this result.

Have you conducted in-person interviews at any of the regional patent offices (Denver, San Jose, Dallas, Detroit)?  If so, how did it go?  Was it easy or difficult to arrange the interview with the Examiner?  Please post a comment below.

 

 

Only today I learned of the hottest collectible these days — trading cards issued by the US Patent and Trademark Office.  My personal favorite is the Nikola Tesla trading card.  Nikola Tesla, famed inventor and proponent of alternating current, operated an enormous experimental wireless power transmission station near Colorado Springs around 1899-1904.

Continue reading “USPTO trading cards”

In this article I will describe what I think are Best Practices for filing of US provisional patent applications.   Continue reading “Best Practices for filing a US provisional patent application”

In a previous blog article, I talked about the USPTO’s practice of not reporting pendency numbers bigger than 30.  Said differently, if a particular art unit has a backlog that extends further than 30 months into the future, the USPTO will not reveal the actual backlog but will instead report the number 30.  In the world of d’Arsonval meter movements, this would be like a meter that is “pegged” at 30.

There are 514 art units at the USPTO.  Right now in July of 2018, how many of those art units are “pegged”?  Which art units are “pegged”?

In the next blog article I will list some of the art units with the smallest backlogs.

Continue reading ““Pegged” art units in the USPTO”

In a previous blog article I listed the fifty art units at the USPTO (out of 514 art units) that are “pegged”.  What this means is that the backlog for the art unit is so great that it is longer than 30 months, and the USPTO does not report a number bigger than 30 for the backlog.

What the alert reader might ask is, which are the art units with the smallest backlog?  Here is a list of the 49 art units which, in July of 2018, have a backlog of seven months or less. Continue reading “USPTO’s art units with the smallest backlogs”