QPIDS is pretty good but it could be much better. The point of QPIDS, of course, is that sometimes you find an urgent need to file an IDS at a time when, unfortunately, the Issue Fee has already been paid. Before QPIDS, most applicants facing such a problem were stuck filing (and paying for) an RCE, with all of the drawbacks that come with it.
Dealing with the January 5 problem
Applicants probably need to start thinking now about what they will do if the USPTO eventually concludes that it will never be able to recover the day’s worth of patent applications that were filed on January 5. I say this because even now, on January 14, 2015, many thousands of patent applications filed on January 5 are missing from PAIR. This blog post reviews the sequence of events thus far and talks about what applicants may need to do about this problem at the USPTO.
USPTO e-commerce systems continue to stumble
USPTO online systems continue to stumble or crash. Much of this, I expect, is a consequence of cobbled-together temporary fixes to the massive UPS failures that happened on December 22. Here’s a brief recap of today’s situation:
- Newly filed patent applications and entries into the US national phase that were filed on January 5 seem to have been lost. USPTO is trying to recover them but after more than a week they have not been recovered. See further comments on this “January 5 problem” in a later blog post.
- EFS-Web petitions that are supposed to be auto-granted are all broken. We have a case that is scheduled to issue next Tuesday and we need to get it withdrawn from issue. The auto-granting petition in EFS-Web keeps freezing and crashing. EBC has acknowledged this as a known problem. Hopefully USPTO will get this system repaired before next Tuesday.
- Document display within TSDR has been on-again-off-again for the past couple of days. As of right this moment it is on again.
- ETAS sometimes crashes when you try to pay the recordation fee. (EPAS does not have this problem because of course patent recordations are free of charge!) There is a complicated workaround that involves saving the submission and taking off your shoes and putting them back on again. (Just kidding.)
- Visibility of recently filed documents in IFW is nonexistent. Newly filed documents are supposed to be visible within one hour. We are pretty consistently seeing delays of 18 hours or more before a document is visible in IFW. This is a Big Problem.
- EFS-Web ack receipts and fee payment pages are flaky. This happened to many cases filed December 22 and December 27. Even now as of January 14, USPTO has not yet provided accurate ack receipts and fee payment pages. This is happening again now on new EFS-Web filings as of January 13. The short-term survival steps for customers include checking the “fees” tab in PAIR and looking up the transaction in Financial Profile.
Patent applications filed January 5 still missing in PAIR
Today is Monday, January 11. As of today there are still many patent applications which applicants filed on Tuesday, January 5, that are lost within the USPTO. They cannot be viewed in PAIR. I reported this problem on January 8.
It is puzzling that this loss of newly filed patent applications is not mentioned at the USPTO Systems Status and Availability page.
We filed ten new US patent applications that day. And we entered the US national phase in one case on that day. And we cannot see any of those filings in PAIR. USPTO’s internal standard is that a newly filed document should be visible in PAIR within one hour.
We reported these lost patent applications to the EBC, and this is what we heard back from the EBC:
Thank you for contacting the Electronic Business Center regarding this matter. We are currently experiencing issues with applications that were filed on 1/5/2016 not loading into the system properly which caused issues with paying fees and users are experiencing issues with trying to log back into the system to pay fees later or bringing the application up in Private Pair to view. The USPTO is aware of the matter and are currently working to resolve those issues. We apologize for the inconveniences.
We have seen many, many cases where it took longer than it should have taken for something filed in EFS-Web to become visible in PAIR. But this delay of six days is unprecedented.
Things that got fax-filed during the massive USPTO outage
As I mentioned here, one of the open questions was how long it would take the USPTO to get around to processing the large number of fax and paper filings that filers filed in desperation during the outage of all USPTO systems from December 22 to December 27.
There is a document that we fax-filed on December 26. And since December 26 we kept checking PAIR every day to see when USPTO people would get around to posting the document to IFW.
The document finally turned up in IFW on January 6. In other words, it took eleven days for the USPTO to take this fax and put it into IFW.
We’re still not out of the woods on this, because of course the mere presence of a document in IFW does not permit the Examiner to actually do anything with the document. Once the document gets into IFW, it has to pass through various reviews by paralegals and Legal Instruments Examiners. Only after they have all blessed the document will it get forwarded to the Examiner. Today is January 8 and the paralegals and LIEs have not yet processed this document.
Maybe the biggest loser in this débacle was the hapless Examiner. Recall that this was a finally rejected case in which the Examiner had said if we were to do X, she could allow the case. And the document, which we had been trying to e-file since December 22, did X. If things had proceeded normally, the Examiner could have disposed of the case (through allowance) within the calendar quarter ending December 31. Instead this case is still dragging on in January, and even now the Examiner is not able to dispose of the case. The Examiner will not even be able to dispose of the case within the present biweek.
The client also loses out. This case will eventually get issued, but the issue date will be at least two weeks later than it should have been. The client will lose two weeks of patent term with this débacle. (The Patent Term Adjustment process will probably not help in this particular case.)
Office of Patent Petitions backlog worsens
The policy goals of the Patent Prosecution Highway are served only if PPH requests are granted promptly. Unfortunately the USPTO is failing to grant PPH requests promptly, and things are getting worse instead of better. Here’s the latest. Continue reading “Office of Patent Petitions backlog worsens”
Patent applications filed January 5 disappear
Our office e-filed a dozen patent applications at the USPTO on January 5, 2016. Today is January 8 and even now, not one of these patent applications is visible in PAIR.
What we have heard from the Electronic Business Center is that this is a known problem. Other filers who filed patent applications on January 5 have likewise been unable to see the applications in PAIR.
Let’s hope that the USPTO gets this problem straightened out soon.
This sort of problem at the USPTO is yet another reason to file a new PCT application in the RO/IB rather than RO/US. Newly filed PCT applications at RO/IB (if filed electronically using an ePCT eOwnership code) are visible in ePCT instantly.
As a reminder, a US-based would-be filer in RO/IB needs to make sure that either (a) the invention was not made in the US, or (b) a Foreign Filing License has already been obtained, perhaps through the priority document.
Continued aftermath of massive USPTO system crash
(See followup article here.)
Yes the USPTO managed to get its systems more or less functioning by December 28 after the massive crash that ran from December 22 to 27. But even now, two weeks after the crash, applicants are still affected by it daily.
As one example, there was a response to an Office Action that we had hoped to e-file in EFS-Web on December 22. No luck there, the system crash made it impossible to e-file anything then or for some days thereafter. So in this particular case we fax-filed the response. We did that on December 26.
More than a week has passed — five business days — and there is no hint or suggestion in PAIR that we filed a response. Nothing is visible in IFW. Nothing is listed in the Transaction History.
The Office Action to which we responded was one that said “do X and I will allow the case”. The response which we fax-filed does X. This response, if only it were visible to the Examiner, would permit the Examiner to dispose of the case. It would permit our client to receive a Notice of Allowance and to pay the Issue Fee.
But I’d guess that ten times more papers got fax-filed during the period of December 22-27 than would typically have been fax-filed during a normal six-day period. In our experience it normally takes the USPTO a week or more to get a fax-filed document into IFW. I imagine that it will take six weeks or longer for USPTO to work its way out of the massive fax backlog that USPTO now faces.
USPTO site works best in modern web browsers?
Every fiftieth visit or so to the USPTO web site triggers a pop-up Customer Satisfaction Survey. The survey asks things like “How likely are you to return to uspto.gov?” (question 16) and “Do you intend to contact the USPTO Customer Support Centers to get information that you couldn’t find on the USPTO website?” (question 24.3) I have encountered this survey many dozens of times in recent months.
Today the survey popped up again for me, and I filled it out. The question that stuck in my mind the most today was this one:
The USPTO site works best in modern web browsers. Is there a barrier that prevents you from using the most up-to-date browsers? (question 30)
The problem with this question is its false premise. It’s just not true that the USPTO site works best in modern web browsers. Here are two counterexamples:
- Private PAIR and EFS-Web don’t work in Chrome or Microsoft Edge.
- If you try to do a TEAS filing in Chrome, you will find that the editing buttons (buttons for italic and bold and indenting etc.) are missing.
USPTO ought to scrap the Entrust Java applet that it uses in PAIR and EFS-Web, as I blogged in May of 2014.
Recycling ADS data from a parent case
For many years it has been possible to recycle ADS bibliographic (“bib”) data from a parent case into a child case. To do this, you find the old ADS and export the bib data in XML format. Then you import the XML file into a new ADS. Often you will find that before you import the XML file into the new ADS, you need to edit the XML file using Notepad.
USPTO has just announced a new EFS-Web functionality with the catchy name Enhanced Initial Web-based Application Data Sheet. I’ll call it EIWADS.