Hello readers. You will recall (blog article of December 27, 2022) that the practitioner community was invited to sign a letter to USPTO Director Vidal. The letter urged her to read the document entitled The Fool’s Errand That Is DOCX, dated December 27, 2022, and the letter urged her to direct her underlings to read that document.
I am honored to be part of a community of eighty-two patent practitioners who signed that letter to Director Vidal.
This blog article reports that the letter did get sent to the USPTO. You can see the letter, which is dated December 28, 2022, here. The USPTO did receive the letter.
The next day, the USPTO blinked and postponed for another three months one of the really bad parts of its DOCX initiative. See Setting and Adjusting Patent Fees During Fiscal Year 2020, 87 Federal Register 80073, published December 29, 2022.
There is reason to think that the USPTO is moving, albeit slowly, toward yet another bit of progress away from really bad parts of its DOCX initiative, in addition to that blink on December 29, 2022. I hope to write another blog article soon about what might be another bit of progress.
Please take a look at the names of the eighty-two signers. Maybe you know some of them. If so, this might be a good time to say “thank you” to them.
Dear Carl, as a European patent attorney, I read your posts about DOCX with great interest and consider you an authority on the topic. I wonder if there is any patent office (including the IB) where you can file PDF files in the PDF/A or UA format? And if yes, are these patent offices bypassing the traditional OCR stage, or do they flatten the PDF to images (TIFF files) only to later OCR the images (of the text pages) to create the text that we all see in Espacenet and Google Patents? ( I recently learned that even if you file a PCT application with “selectable text” in PDF, OCR is still performed and this time, the OCR introduced some errors in para. [0001] of my WO publication in Espacenet.