(See this followup blog post about what we wrote to one of our instructing foreign patent firms after they responded to the letter quoted below.)
Some non-US patent firms entrust to our firm the filing of US patent applications. We realized that they would need to hear about the $400 non-DOCX penalty that the USPTO started charging on January 17, 2024. Here is what we wrote about the $400 non-DOCX penalty to some of these non-US patent firms: Continue reading “What we are telling non-US patent firms about the DOCX penalty”
I received an email message today from a paralegal who is signed up for next Tuesday’s webinar entitled “Reducing malpractice risk with $400 non-DOCX penalty that will start on January 17, 2024”. The paralegal writes:
I am really looking forward to this webinar. I recruited fellow patent paralegals to view the webinar with me (in the same location). ☺
Despite efforts to convince attorneys to attend, there may be some who might not attend. Will there be a small segment in the webinar where you will provide quality control tips for patent paralegals – who in real life are the ones ultimately responsible for looking after their attorneys?
This paralegal’s email inspired the blog article that you are reading now, in which I try to answer more questions, such as:
Can the attorney skip next Tuesday’s webinar about DOCX risks?
Do you use ISA/EP? Do you use an EPO mailbox to receive ISR/WOs from ISA/EP? Do you use an EPO smart card to log in at the mailbox? Then you need to migrate from a smart card to a time-based one-time password form of two-factor authentication. And you need to do it before the end of 2024. One way to learn how to do this is by attending an EPO webinar that will take place soon. Continue reading “Webinar: Two-factor authentication for those who use ISA/EP”
What exactly are the risks connected with the DOCX filing path? What can the practitioner do, starting on January 17, to try to reduce these malpractice risks? What are Best Practices, going forward, for dealing with the $400 penalty and the DOCX filing path? Attend a webinar in which these questions are discussed in depth. See the brochure page here.
Patent Center has had two service failures in the past 24 hours. The USPTO had promised its users that this would not happen — there are supposedly two servers called “Blue” and “Green”, and if one of them crashes the other is supposed to come into service automatically. The user should not even notice the switchover from one server to the other, we were promised. Despite these promises, there was a first Patent Center service failure yesterday afternoon, and a second Patent Center service failure this morning. Continue reading “Two Patent Center service failures in the past 24 hours”
It is astonishing to see the USPTO developers repeating a mistake now in 2023 that they made in 2020. Back in 2020, it took the developers more than six months to fix it. One wonders how long it will take this time. The mistake was to assume (incorrectly) that “patent offices” are the same thing as “places that you can send mail to”. I am not making this up!
The USPTO people who are developing Patent Center have stepped up the frequency with which users of Patent Center encounter a pop-up window containing a customer survey. It is sad is that one section of the survey (quoted at right) fishes for undeserved compliments. Continue reading “Patent Center developers fishing for compliments”
The USPTO is sticking with its plans to start imposing its $400 penalty for failing to file one’s US patent application in Microsoft Word format. The penalty will start on January 17, or will start on January 18, depending on which sentence of the USPTO’s most recent announcements you choose to trust (blog article). Another way to describe this is that a filer who (a) wishes to avoid at least some of the malpractice risks of filing in Microsoft Word format (the USPTO’s flavor of DOCX), and (b) wishes to avoid having to pay the $400 penalty … will need to include a trusted PDF copy of the application in the e-filing package.
Which means that starting on Thursday, January 18, or maybe starting on Wednesday, January 17, the filer will need to go to some trouble to make sure that a trusted PDF file forms part of the e-filing package.
But it is important to realize that the trusted PDF file does not fully protect the filer.
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One reason that the trusted PDF file does not fully protect the filer is that the USPTO’s e-filing system tampers with the trusted PDF.
As shown in the figure, the first thing that the USPTO does with your trusted PDF is dismember it into TIF images, one per PDF page. And then the USPTO carries out halftoning and resizing. This is the native storage format in IFW. Later if you click to see your trusted PDF, you will find that what IFW gives back to you as a PDF is not bit-for-bit the same as the PDF that you uploaded. The PDF that the IFW gives back to you will, among other things, have a non-identical message digest (hash).
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Here is a real-life example from a real filing of a trusted PDF in a US patent application. At right you can see what I actually uploaded in the PDF.
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And at right you can see what you would actually get back if you were to download the supposedly same PDF file. As you can see, the image is blurred almost beyond recognition.
It seems to me that the filer who wants to avoid the harm caused by the halftoning and resizing would definitely want to index the trusted PDF as “non-black-and-white drawings”. That way the trusted PDF is preserved bit-for-bit.
Do you use ISA/EP? Do you use an EPO mailbox to receive ISR/WOs from ISA/EP? Do you use an EPO smart card to log in at the mailbox? Then you need to migrate from a smart card to a time-based one-time password form of two-factor authentication. And you need to do it before the end of 2024. One way to learn how to do this is by attending an EPO webinar that will take place soon. 
