The massive system crash at the USPTO began about August 15, 2018 and things were sort of almost back to normal around August 21. During the recovery efforts USPTO posted updates that indicated that USPTO was in the position of having to reconstruct the Palm database, apparently by cobbling together various incremental backups to arrive at a reconstruction of what the database might have been like on some particular date and then applying more recent changes, eventually working toward what the contents of the Palm database would have been in the absence of whatever bad thing happened on the 15th.
Not that USPTO ever quite came clean on what exactly the bad thing was that happened to the Palm database on the 15th. Maybe there was a ghost in the machine?
But anyway there were odd things that USPTO did around August 21, 2018 that related to a particular date from about four years earlier — June 25, 2014. Members of the PAIR listserv noticed odd things relating to OCNs (Outgoing Correspondence Notifications).
Continue reading “June 25, 2014 and the recent massive system crash at the USPTO”
There was a development in the industrial design community last month that almost went unnoticed. On July 20, 2018, the Korean Intellectual Property Office became a Depositing Office in the DAS system for designs.
September 1, 2018 is a big day. It is the day that everything changes for US utility patent applicants who are claiming priority from Chinese priority applications. 
