Category: Patentcenter

(Update:  see this blog article for a guess as to what “increase usability for sponsored accounts with large amounts of customer numbers” means. )

For the past seven weeks, and up until just a few hours ago, the USPTO was unwavering in its stated resolve to shut down PAIR and EFS-Web at 11:59 PM tonight.  As recently as yesterday, when meeting with the National Association of Patent Practitioners, the Commissioner for Patents declined to agree to NAPP’s request to postpone the shutdown date (blog article).  Now, on the last possible day, with less than two hours to go before the close of business, the USPTO blinked.  Continue reading “A small blink from the USPTO”

The last thing you heard from me about this was on Saturday, November 4, when I reported that the National Association of Patent Practitioners (NAPP) had been invited by the USPTO to attend a videoconference meeting about Patent Center.  The USPTO made this invitation after receiving NAPP’s October 31, 2023 letter to the USPTO asking that the USPTO’s planned shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web be postponed.  The meeting was scheduled for 11AM yesterday (ET).  Now NAPP has posted a readout of the meeting on LinkedIn.  Continue reading “NAPP met with USPTO about Patent Center yesterday”

I appreciate that the subject line does not narrow things down very much, given a seemingly limitless variety and number of ways that the USPTO has done wrong-headed things with Patent Center over the past five years of its development.  But here is a recent breathtakingly wrong-headed move by the USPTO that deserves particular comment — abruptly imposing upon all applicants an extremely disruptive and wholly unnecessary roadblock to the uploading of PDF files.   It makes Patent Center, which was already not easy to use given its many bugs, even harder to use.

Continue reading “The most recent USPTO wrong-headedness with Patent Center”

In this blog article I will acknowledge a welcome human contact from a USPTO person today.  Continue reading “Acknowledging a human contact from the USPTO today”

(Update:  shortly after this blog post, a nice person at the USPTO got in touch.)

Today, the USPTO quietly fixed Patent Center bug CP31.  For more than three years, this bug was a trap for the unwary user (blog article, June 23, 2020).  The user who made the mistake of checking for outgoing correspondence using Patent Center rather than PAIR ran the risk of malpractice in two distinct ways:

• • If the user were to check for outgoing correspondence on a Monday or a Tuesday, the Patent Center report would always state that there is no outgoing correspondence even if, in truth, there was outgoing correspondence.
  • On other days of the week, on average the Patent Center report would be missing about 11% of the user’s outgoing correspondence.

Continue reading “USPTO quietly fixes Patent Center bug CP31”

When the City of Denver sold the bonds that would pay for the construction of Denver International Airport (to replace Stapleton airport), there was language in the bonds that imposed a contractual obligation:  on the day that DIA was placed into service, deep grooves would be cut into each of the runways at Stapleton.  Continue reading “Will the USPTO cut deep grooves in the airport runways?”

Update:  the meeting took place (blog article).

The USPTO’s planned shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web will be this coming Tuesday, November 7 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time (see countdown clock).  The National Association of Patent Practitioners (NAPP) wrote a letter to USPTO Director Kathi Vidal on October 31, 2023 (blog article), asking the USPTO to postpone the shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web.  In response to this letter, Commissioner for Patents Vaishali Udupa has invited NAPP to meet with her and her colleagues about Patent Center on Monday, November 6.  Others attending from the USPTO will be Deputy Commissioner for Patent Administration Richard Seidel, Richard Fernandez, and Tony Uranga.  Attending on behalf of NAPP will be its president, Rich Baker, and its vice president, Dan Smith.  The meeting will take place at 11AM Eastern Time.

It will be fascinating to hear about the results of the meeting.

(Update:  USPTO leadership has, indeed, taken corrective action (blog article).)

It crosses my mind that this kind of thing with the EBC telling people that Patent Center is not ready (see blog article) will very likely lead to a corrective action by USPTO leadership. No, I do not mean that USPTO leadership will postpone the shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web (now planned for November 8) until Patent Center is “ready”. Nor do I mean that USPTO leadership will actually do the hard work of making Patent Center “ready” between now and November 8. I mean that a memo will get circulated to the representatives at the EBC, telling them that between now and November 8, no user is to be told that the workaround for a Patent Center bug is to “use PAIR instead” or “use EFS-Web instead”.

Okay, folks, let’s try to figure out if Patent Center is actually “ready” so that the USPTO can shut down PAIR and EFS-Web.  The USPTO decisionmakers have made it very clear that the views of actual USPTO customers (many of whom say the answer is “no”) are not to be credited on this point.    But suppose there were an actual USPTO employee who communicates, by the employee’s own words and actions, that they do not think Patent Center is “ready”.  Would that be enough to convince the USPTO decisionmakers otherwise?

On October 31, 2023, USPTO customer Victoria O’Conner was trying to file a PCT application in Patent Center.  But Patent Center stopped working at the fee payment selection page.  So she called the EBC.  The EBC representative said “use EFS-Web instead”.    This was EBC ticket number 1-842304670.  This is also CP ticket number CP176.

If the USPTO were to blink (postpone the shutdown date for PAIR and EFS-Web presently scheduled for November 8), I am quite confident that I can predict the language the USPTO will use in the “blink notice”.  Continue reading “If the USPTO were to blink on the November 8 shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web …”