Category: Patentcenter

When I was first in practice, you could purchase up to three months of extensions of time to pay an Issue Fee.  That ended around a decade ago.  For the past decade, the situation has been that if you are as little as one day late in paying your Issue Fee, the application will go abandoned.  You would then be faced with the prospect of having to pay a USPTO fee of $2100 (or $840, or $420) along with a Petition to Revive, to overcome the abandonment.

With this in mind, here is a screen shot from Patent Center in an application that has received a Notice of Allowance.  For this allowed US patent application, the legal advice from the USPTO is:

Payment of fees during this stage of the application process is optional, but failure to pay fees in a timely manner may cause delays in the processing of your application.

This legal advice is, as any experienced practitioner knows, flatly false.  In no way is the payment of the Issue Fee “optional”.  And the consequence of failing to pay the Issue Fee “in a timely manner” does not merely “cause delays in the processing” — it abandons the application.

For an experienced practitioner, this wrong legal advice probably routinely gets ignored.  But in recent years the USPTO has done lots of outreach urging inventors to file pro se.  It is surely only a matter of time before some pro se inventor believes this wrong advice and ends up with no patent at all.

Continue reading “USPTO gives legal advice, and it’s flat wrong”

On October 12, 2023 I sent an email to USPTO Commissioner Udupa containing a list of fifteen EBC trouble tickets that relate to bugs in Patent Center (see email), asking her to let us know the open-or-closed status of those EBC trouble tickets.  We did not hear back.  This was in preparation for our in-person meeting with Commissioner Udupa about Patent Center that was going to take place on October 18.  On October 17, the day before the in-person meeting, Commissioner Udupa emailed us (see email) to report that she was “completing her full review” not only of those fifteen EBC trouble tickets but also a group of 350 EBC trouble tickets relating to Patent Center, that she hoped to discuss with us the following day in the in-person meeting.  During the in-person meeting, she did not provide the results of her review.

So on November 17, 2023, USPTO Commissioner Udupa received this letter.  It reminded her that we still hoped to hear back from her on the status of the first fifteen EBC trouble tickets, and on the status of the 350 EBC tickets that she told us about on October 17 2023.

More than two months have passed with no response from Commissioner Udupa.  Here is my conclusion, as predicted here:

If we were to fail to hear back from Commissioner Udupa in response to this letter, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that she is tacitly admitting that she was wrong when she said the EBC gets back to people about EBC tickets about Patent Center.  If we were to fail to hear back from Commissioner Udupa in response to this letter, I think it would be reasonable to conclude that she is tacitly admitting that we were correct when we told her that the EBC has never, not even once, gotten back to people about EBC tickets about Patent Center.

 

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!

Continue reading “Three years later, USPTO developers repeat a coding mistake”

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”

Today is Thursday, November 16.  USPTO leadership shut down PAIR and EFS-Web at about 11:59 PM on Tuesday, November 14.  We can reflect on things with two days’ perspective.  Continue reading “Looking back, two days after the demise of PAIR and EFS-Web”

Today I had to pay an Issue Fee.  Let’s see how many Patent Center bugs and missing features I encountered in a single e-filing session in Patent Center, trying to pay an Issue Fee. Try to guess how many bugs and missing features were encountered. Continue reading “How many Patent Center bugs and missing features can one encounter in a single e-filing task?”

The USPTO developers don’t even play by their own rules, as I will describe here.  Continue reading “USPTO developers fail to play by their own rules — “PDF””

Just now I logged in at Patent Center and tried to view my outgoing correspondence.  I was greeted with a big red error message saying Search Limit Reached.  This is bug number CP178.  I opened EBC ticket number 1-843318724.   EBC agent 50 checked with the Patent Center team and reported back that this is a feature, not a bug.  This feature blocks data mining, he explained.  Continue reading “Patent Center is not ready, and PAIR cannot be shut down tonight”

Readers will recall that originally the USPTO was firm in its commitment to a shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web at 11:59 PM on November 7, 2023 (blog article).

Readers will also recall that with less than two hours remaining before the close of business on November 7, the USPTO blinked and did not shut down PAIR and EFS-Web that day (blog article).  Instead, the USPTO postponed the shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web by four business days.  The shutdown got postponed to 11:59 PM today, November 14.

Yes, the USPTO has firmly stated today is the day that it will shut down PAIR and EFS-Web.  This will happen at 11:59 PM tonight.