Yesterday USPTO released its Global Dossier public access system. I blogged about this. In that blog article I listed three design flaws in that system. Today, having had a day to play with the system, I can describe something important that is missing from that system. Continue reading “What’s missing from USPTO’s Global Dossier public access system”
Disappointing news about PPH petitions
In September of 2015 I posted a blog article celebrating some exciting news about PPH petitions. In that article (“Unexpectedly fast PCT-PPH decisions at USPTO“) I noted that we had gotten some cases onto the Patent Prosecution Highway a mere three weeks after filing the PCT-PPH petition. This was very good news given that previously it was taking anywhere from four to seven months for the Office of Patent Petitions to get around to examining PPH petitions. The letters communicating the three-week grants of Highway status came from a different part of the USPTO (not the Office of Patent Petitions) namely the Office of International Patent Legal Administration (the former Office of PCT Legal Administration).
At our firm we use PPH a lot. We try to track our PPH cases pretty closely. When we saw this good news in September of 2015, we figured USPTO had gotten a clue and had changed its workflow so that PCT-PPH petitions were going to OIPLA instead of going to OPP. And OIPLA was deciding such petitions fairly promptly after filing.
Well, it turns out I was wrong about this. Continue reading “Disappointing news about PPH petitions”
Best practices/strategies for claim drafting to avoid Alice issues?
Over on the EFS-Web listserv, a list member asked:
Is anyone aware of any training materials, articles, guides, etc. providing best practices/strategies for claim drafting to avoid Alice issues in new patent applications?
Here’s what I think about that: Continue reading “Best practices/strategies for claim drafting to avoid Alice issues?”
Global Dossier public access now functioning
(See followup article here.)
Weeks and months ago USPTO delivered webinars and other outre
aches in which it demonstrated the soon-to-be-functioning Global Dossier public access system. Today the system got released. You can see it here. Its chief advantage for US filers will be that it will provide English-language access to information in the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese patent office databases.
I will explain a bit about how it works and what you can do with it. Continue reading “Global Dossier public access now functioning”
Spoke too soon — USPTO did not get it right
In a recent blog post I said “USPTO gets it right — new way to pay issue fees”. Turns out I was mistaken. USPTO did not get it right when implementing its new way to pay issue fees. What a disappointment. Continue reading “Spoke too soon — USPTO did not get it right”
USPTO gets it right — new way to pay issue fees
Note: I was mistaken that USPTO did something right this time. See my followup blog post.
USPTO gets credit for doing something right this time.
First a bit of background. For many years, as many readers know, the process of paying an Issue Fee has been cumbersome and error-prone. You take Form 85B and you copy and paste the various pieces of information onto the form. (In our office we use the “typewriter” function of paid-for Acrobat to fill in the various fields.) What happens then is that somebody at the USPTO hand-types the various pieces of information into USPTO systems for use in typesetting the to-be-issued patent.
We track this stuff pretty closely for our clients’ patents, and over the course of twenty years we have seen USPTO fat-finger the Form-85B information no less often than 2.8% of the time. When this happens we often feel we must ask USPTO to issue a Certificate of Correction. And what’s very unfortunate is that USPTO does not update its Full-Text database to reflect the the CofC. In practical terms this means that a search in the Full-Text database that failed before the CofC (because USPTO misspelled, say, the assignee name) will still fail even after the issuance of the CofC.
So what is it that the USPTO got right this time? Continue reading “USPTO gets it right — new way to pay issue fees”
How to receive PCT communications electronically?
A member of the PCT listserv asks:
A colleague recently filed a PCT application with the USPTO and we’ve been receiving the notifications (such as the “Notification of the International Application Number and of the International Filing Date”, Form PCT/RO/105) by hard copy.
Is it possible to receive electronic versions of notifications concerning a PCT application? If yes, how do I set it up to do so?
The answer is “yes” as I will now explain.
Continue reading “How to receive PCT communications electronically?”
Is a PCT protest worthwhile?
A member of the PCT listserv posed a question earlier today:
I’d like to protest a lack of unity of invention finding from the ISA/US where the authorized officer has indicated that the first and second inventions share technical features known in the art at the time of the invention, and thus cannot be considered special technical features that would otherwise unify the groups. The art used to support this finding is suspect and I will indicate the reasoning for my position in my protest. I will also be paying the second search fee.
Has any listmate successfully protested such a finding from ISA/US? If so, would you be willing to share your protest document? I am debating how detailed to make my response. How seriously can these protests be reviewed when they are free of charge?
I’ll talk a bit about PCT protests and I will try to answer this list member’s questions as best I can. Continue reading “Is a PCT protest worthwhile?”
All USPTO patent e-filing systems are broken
Despite having been told many times to take corrective measures, USPTO has even now not moved its backup e-filing server to a redundant location. This causes great harm to customers of the USPTO. See, quoted above, the notice appearing today on USPTO’s web site. Continue reading “All USPTO patent e-filing systems are broken”
USPTO now provides PDF patents
In our patent firm, every day somebody needs to obtain a
US patent or published US patent application as a PDF. We send the PDFs to clients and foreign agents and we save them to our own file servers for internal use.
For many years USPTO went out of its way to make it very difficult for a user to obtain a copy of a US patent or published application, providing only TIF images (not PDFs) and those only one page at a time. Users wanting a PDF had to use software such as GetIPDL which would download the TIF images one by one and stitch them together into a PDF. Another approach for a user was to draw upon any of a number of private web sites for a multipage PDF of a patent. Some of these private web sites charged money for the PDFs, and one of them tacked an advertising message across the bottom of the first page of the PDF.
Now the USPTO has quietly changed its PatFT (patents full text) and AppFT (patent application full text) databases so that with the click of a mouse, the user can view a multipage PDF containing all pages of a patent or published application. With another click of the mouse (see the “full pages” button above), the user can download the PDF and make normal use of it.
Refreshingly, USPTO has done this in a way that tacks the Certificate of Correction (if any) onto the back of the PDF.
What one wishes, of course, is that USPTO would provide a “constructable” link which would directly yield the PDF file. The wish is that a link along the lines of https://www.uspto.gov/patents/7123456.pdf would retrieve a PDF of US patent number 7123456 and something similar for published US patent applications. As far as I can see the new USPTO system does not provide such a constructable link. Instead USPTO seems to have designed this new “full pages” link in a way that requires a human being to do the mouse clicks to obtain the PDF file.
Setting aside my disappointment about the lack of constructable links for the PDF files, the fact is that USPTO has moved closer toward actual user-friendliness in this area. Kudos to the USPTO!