Category: Patents

I have blogged here (in 2015) and here (in 2014) about the need for USPTO to implement SSL (secure sockets layer or “https://”) on all of its external-facing web sites.  I have reminded the USPTO that there is an executive order from the White House directing all US government agencies to do this.  USPTO was very slow to comply, but has made some progress.  One of the last web sites that USPTO managed to migrate to SSL was the Public PAIR web site.

Recently came the disappointing news that USPTO made plans to roll back the functionality of the Public PAIR web site.  In a posting on April 3, 2017, USPTO said:

The USPTO will be performing maintenance on the Public Patent
Application Information Retrieval (Public Pair) beginning at 12:01
a.m., Friday, April 21 and ending at 2 a.m., Friday, April 21 ET.

During the maintenance period, Public PAIR will be unavailable.

Immediately after the maintenance, users will only be able to access
Public PAIR through URLs beginning with HTTP, such as
https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair. Past URLs using HTTPS to
access Public Pair, such as
https://portal.uspto.gov/pair/PublicPair, will no longer work.

Now comes an announcement on April 24, 2017:

HTTPS access to Public PAIR

The USPTO’s public facing legacy systems, such as Public PAIR, were not designed to support HTTPS protocol. The agency has worked hard to enhance these legacy systems to support HTTPS. Following the agency’s April 11, 2017 deployment of HTTPS to Public PAIR, some public users reported errors accessing Public PAIR. A decision was made to back-out the new HTTPS capability while the agency investigated a resolution to the issue. We expect to implement a fix and restoration of the HTTPS protocol in the next few weeks. The USPTO is sorry for any inconvenience.

There’s just no excuse for this.  People who administer web sites are well aware that there are off-the-shelf solutions for adding SSL functionality to any legacy web site.  There are modestly priced commercial boxes (simple boxes that you connect between the web server and the Internet) to do this.  For those who cannot afford a modestly priced commercial solution, there are off-the-shelf open-source solutions that run on a simple inexpensive Linux box.  These solutions do not require any modification to the legacy system, and they do not slow down the user access data rates.

Let’s hope USPTO does a Google search or two and learns how to do this.

You may recall my blog post of March 25, 2017 entitled “USPTO thinks there is such a thing as a “provisional patent”?”  I wrote:

It will be interesting to see if, after the posting of this blog article, the USPTO revises its home page to delete the mention of a “provisional patent”.

Here is the front page of the USPTO web site before my blog post:
Here is how the USPTO revised the front page after my blog post:

A couple of years ago I taught a webinar called Get Patents Fast!  The point of this webinar was to enumerate and compare and contrast the various initiatives at the USPTO for getting a patent fast.

Last week a colleague at a New England patent firm asked if she could get her patent application made “special” by filing a petition under 37 CFR § 1.102 showing that the invention would “contribute to the … conservation of energy resources.”  She’s right that Rule 102 says that you can do that.  But as it turns out, you can’t really do that, as I will explain.  Oddly, in a few months it may once again be possible to do that, as I will also explain. Continue reading “Oddity about making a patent application “special””

As I mentioned in a February 18, 2017 blog post, USPTO has proposed to scrap the Accelerated Exam (AE) program (see the January 12, 2017 Federal Register notice).  There’s an oddity about how the USPTO went about implementing AE in the first place that means that scrapping AE would have a peculiar consequence, namely to bring back three ways of making applications “special” that had been unavailable (from a practical point of view) for the past decade.  I will explain.  As best I can see, nobody at the USPTO, nor any of the handful of commenters in response to this Federal Register notice, has thought about this peculiarity. Continue reading “Whither Accelerated Examination?”

Here are some of my past April Fool’s Day blog articles:

• Now you can hand-file applications in the four satellite patent offices!
• USPTO relocates “contingency” EFS-Web server to Denver patent office
• A little-known USPTO initiative to reduce the backlog

As for the second article (USPTO relocates its “contingency” EFS-Web server) what is particularly sad is that it should not have been an April Fool’s article at all.  As many have pointed out over the course of many years, there is an ongoing need for USPTO to relocate its contigency patent e-filing server to a geographic location distant from the main e-filing server.  There have been many system outages at the USPTO over the years in which both the main server and the “contingency” server were both out of service.  It is just common sense that the two servers should not be in the same building, connected to the Internet through the same single connection point, powered by the same source of electrical power.

WIPO’s release of its latest version of ePCT, with its two new user-friendly approaches to two-factor authentication, provides some perspective.  Against this perspective, conspicuous by its absence is any hint or suggestion of USPTO moving to some user-friendly approach to two-factor authentication. Continue reading “Why can’t USPTO use a user-friendly two-factor authentication?”