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It is welcome news that today, January 21, 2016, the USPTO has recovered the thousands of patent applications that were filed on January 5 and that were lost within the USPTO.
The ten design cases that we filed that day are now visible to us in Private PAIR. The US national phase entry that we carried out that day is now visible to us in Private PAIR.
We now have over a dozen PPH petitions that have lain untouched in the Office of Patent Petitions for more than five months, and just today our oldest untouched PPH petition entered its seventh month of pendency. Yes, more than six months have passed since it was filed and no sign of action by the OPP.
As I mentioned in earlier blog posts here and here and here, the backlog has been getting worse and worse in the Office of Patent Petitions. The OPP dashboard would have the reader believe that the backlog is 152 days. In reality it is worse than 180 days. But even if it were 152 days, that would not be a reasonable pendency. The PPH petitions are essentially self-certified by the filer. Very little review by USPTO personnel is actually required for such petitions.
USPTO needs to do better.
QPIDS is pretty good but it could be much better. The point of QPIDS, of course, is that sometimes you find an urgent need to file an IDS at a time when, unfortunately, the Issue Fee has already been paid. Before QPIDS, most applicants facing such a problem were stuck filing (and paying for) an RCE, with all of the drawbacks that come with it.
Applicants probably need to start thinking now about what they will do if the USPTO eventually concludes that it will never be able to recover the day’s worth of patent applications that were filed on January 5. I say this because even now, on January 14, 2015, many thousands of patent applications filed on January 5 are missing from PAIR. This blog post reviews the sequence of events thus far and talks about what applicants may need to do about this problem at the USPTO.
USPTO online systems continue to stumble or crash. Much of this, I expect, is a consequence of cobbled-together temporary fixes to the massive UPS failures that happened on December 22. Here’s a brief recap of today’s situation:
David Bowie enriched the world in many ways, innovating in musical performance, film, theater, and dance. How many of us are aware that one of his innovations was the securitized intellectual property right — the “Bowie bond”? Continue reading “The “Bowie bond””
Today is Monday, January 11. As of today there are still many patent applications which applicants filed on Tuesday, January 5, that are lost within the USPTO. They cannot be viewed in PAIR. I reported this problem on January 8.
It is puzzling that this loss of newly filed patent applications is not mentioned at the USPTO Systems Status and Availability page.
We filed ten new US patent applications that day. And we entered the US national phase in one case on that day. And we cannot see any of those filings in PAIR. USPTO’s internal standard is that a newly filed document should be visible in PAIR within one hour.
We reported these lost patent applications to the EBC, and this is what we heard back from the EBC:
Thank you for contacting the Electronic Business Center regarding this matter. We are currently experiencing issues with applications that were filed on 1/5/2016 not loading into the system properly which caused issues with paying fees and users are experiencing issues with trying to log back into the system to pay fees later or bringing the application up in Private Pair to view. The USPTO is aware of the matter and are currently working to resolve those issues. We apologize for the inconveniences.
We have seen many, many cases where it took longer than it should have taken for something filed in EFS-Web to become visible in PAIR. But this delay of six days is unprecedented.
As I mentioned here, one of the open questions was how long it would take the USPTO to get around to processing the large number of fax and paper filings that filers filed in desperation during the outage of all USPTO systems from December 22 to December 27.
There is a document that we fax-filed on December 26. And since December 26 we kept checking PAIR every day to see when USPTO people would get around to posting the document to IFW.
The document finally turned up in IFW on January 6. In other words, it took eleven days for the USPTO to take this fax and put it into IFW.
We’re still not out of the woods on this, because of course the mere presence of a document in IFW does not permit the Examiner to actually do anything with the document. Once the document gets into IFW, it has to pass through various reviews by paralegals and Legal Instruments Examiners. Only after they have all blessed the document will it get forwarded to the Examiner. Today is January 8 and the paralegals and LIEs have not yet processed this document.
Maybe the biggest loser in this débacle was the hapless Examiner. Recall that this was a finally rejected case in which the Examiner had said if we were to do X, she could allow the case. And the document, which we had been trying to e-file since December 22, did X. If things had proceeded normally, the Examiner could have disposed of the case (through allowance) within the calendar quarter ending December 31. Instead this case is still dragging on in January, and even now the Examiner is not able to dispose of the case. The Examiner will not even be able to dispose of the case within the present biweek.
The client also loses out. This case will eventually get issued, but the issue date will be at least two weeks later than it should have been. The client will lose two weeks of patent term with this débacle. (The Patent Term Adjustment process will probably not help in this particular case.)
The policy goals of the Patent Prosecution Highway are served only if PPH requests are granted promptly. Unfortunately the USPTO is failing to grant PPH requests promptly, and things are getting worse instead of better. Here’s the latest. Continue reading “Office of Patent Petitions backlog worsens”
Our office e-filed a dozen patent applications at the USPTO on January 5, 2016. Today is January 8 and even now, not one of these patent applications is visible in PAIR.
What we have heard from the Electronic Business Center is that this is a known problem. Other filers who filed patent applications on January 5 have likewise been unable to see the applications in PAIR.
Let’s hope that the USPTO gets this problem straightened out soon.
This sort of problem at the USPTO is yet another reason to file a new PCT application in the RO/IB rather than RO/US. Newly filed PCT applications at RO/IB (if filed electronically using an ePCT eOwnership code) are visible in ePCT instantly.
As a reminder, a US-based would-be filer in RO/IB needs to make sure that either (a) the invention was not made in the US, or (b) a Foreign Filing License has already been obtained, perhaps through the priority document.