NAPP writes to the USPTO about Patent Center not being ready

Update:  NAPP will meet with USPTO about this on November 6 (blog article).  The meeting took place (blog article).   

At this page you can see the countdown until the USPTO says it will shut down PAIR and EFS-Web.  As of today, that day is 5 days away.  And yet another professional association, the National Association of Patent Practitioners, has told the USPTO that it does not think Patent Center is ready. 

It will be recalled that on October 18, 2023, there was a face-to-face meeting between representatives of the Patent Center listserv and Commissioner for Patents Viashali Udupa and her people, about Patent Center.  During that meeting, what I heard from Vaishali was:

• • Everybody that the USPTO had talked to about Patent Center (other than us, namely the members of the Patent Center listserv) believed that Patent Center is sufficiently ready that EFS-Web and PAIR can be shut down as scheduled on November 8.
  • Both AIPLA and IPO had given the USPTO positive feedback that they are comfortable with the retirement of PAIR and EFS-Web. Both AIPLA and IPO are fine with moving forward with Patent Center.

When I heard this from the Commissioner for Patents on October 18, I told her that I thought she was mistaken about AIPLA’s position on this.  But she insisted that I was the mistaken one about AIPLA’s position.  But on October 31, AIPLA sent a letter to the USPTO, riterating its earlier request that the USPTO postpone its shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web from the presently scheduled date of November 8, 2023.   You can read about it here.

And now the National Association of Patent Practitioners (NAPP) has written a letter dated November 1, 2023 to the USPTO, requesting that the USPTO postpone its shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web from the presently scheduled date of November 8, 2023.  You can see the letter here.

I wonder if there really is any professional association that shares the Commissioner’s view that supposedly Patent Center is ready.