Category: Patents

Yesterday the USPTO published a graph showing progress in disposing of what had been a very discouraging backlog of unattended-to Patent Prosecution Highway requests.  Here is the graph:

From a glance at this graph, one might have the impression that the problem at the USPTO had started in October of 2015.  In fact the problem dated from at least as early as November 2014, when I blogged about ever-increasing delays at the USPTO in granting PPH requests.  In April of 2015 I had faxed a letter to Director Lee about this growing backlog.

USPTO’s graph indicates a backlog of unattended-to PPH requests of about 3200 cases in October 2015, reaching a peak of about 4000 in February 2016, and a notable drop to around 2400 as of a few weeks ago.  (I note that our firm, all by itself, was responsible for something like 2% of all of these PPH cases.)

The interesting question is how this effort at the USPTO is working out nowadays for particular applicants.  We try to track these things pretty closely at our firm, and here is what we see. Continue reading “USPTO does better with PPH requests lately”

In the old days (more than two weeks ago), when you were paying some maintenance fees, you had to treat each individual maintenance fee as a separate task.  For each maintenance fee, you had to hand-key six categories of information — the credit card number, the expiration date, the CCV code, the cardholder name, the billing address, and the billing Zip code.  For a filer who was paying more than one maintenance fee, this was tedious.  But two weeks ago, things got easier.

Continue reading “Paying maintenance fees has gotten easier”

(Edited on August 15, 2018 to draw attention to the April 1, 2016 posting date.)

In an unpublicized move, the USPTO has relocated its “contingency” EFS-Web server to the Denver patent office.

This is, of course, welcome news.  Customers of the USPTO well recall the massive system crash in December of 2015, in which the main EFS-Web server and the “contingency” EFS-Web server both crashed and were unavailable for some six days.  That massive USPTO system crash reminded everyone of the many reasons why a backup server ought to be located at a geographically separate location from the location of the main server.  The backup server ought to receive electrical power in a completely different way than the main server, from a different electric company.  The backup server ought to be connected to the Internet in a completely different way than the main server, from a different Internet service provider.  Responsible system practice calls for the minimization of the number of “single points of failure” that could knock out both systems at once.

According to the USPTO, a single event at the USPTO on December 22, 2015 having something to do with a power conditioning system knocked out both the main server and the “contingency” server.

Customers of the USPTO also well recall the system crash on May 14, 2014 when both the main EFS-Web server and the “contingency” server crashed for some eighteen hours.

So as I say, today’s development is welcome news.  Starting today, April 1, 2016, any failure that were to knock out the main server in Alexandria, Virginia would be very unlikely to knock out the “contingency” server in the Denver patent office (or vice versa).  They have different power sources, for example, and different Internet connections.

Kudos to the USPTO for taking this important step!