Ant-Like Persistence

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.  Continue reading “NAPP writes to the USPTO about Patent Center not being ready”

As described in this report, a face-to-face meeting took place on October 18, 2023 between representatives of the Patent Center listserv and Commissioner for Patents Vaishali Udupa and her Patent Center staff.   At the start of the meeting, Commissioner Udupa started to present an 18-slide deck which we had never seen before.  You can see the slide deck here.  Slides 3 through 18 have one CP trouble ticket on each slide, meaning that sixteen CP trouble tickets are shown, one per slide.   This blog article discusses each of the sixteen trouble tickets in detail.  Continue reading “Detailed review of USPTO’s 18-slide deck about Patent Center”

Here is a report about the face-to-face October 18, 2023 meeting with USPTO people about Patent Center.  Continue reading “The in-person meeting at the USPTO on October 18 about Patent Center”

Yesterday the AIPLA wrote a letter to the USPTO, reiterating 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 see the letter here.  Attached to AIPLA’s letter was an extra copy of AIPLA’s July 28, 2023 slide presentation.  Continue reading “AIPLA again asks USPTO to postpone the shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web”

In a previous blog article I recounted some of the many times that the patent community has sent letters to the USPTO leadership about Patent Center that have gone unanswered, and has sent emails to the USPTO leadership about Patent Center that have gone without response, and has left telephone messages to the USPTO leadership about Patent Center that were never returned.  What happens next, I asked.  Here are three things that have happened since then, to try to bring about some change at the USPTO about Patent Center:

• A first letter got sent on September 29, 2023 from One Hundred Seventy-Eight Members of the Patent Center Listserv to the Inspector General at the Department of Commerce.  This became the Inspector General’s complaint number 23-0900.  The Inspector General wrote:

  The IG has requested that management officials at the USPTO conduct a thorough and independent inquiry and provide a response to the IG, including a detailed explanation of their review process and any corrective action, if any, they take as a result.

• A letter got sent on October 9, 2023 from  137 intellectual property professionals to the Office of Management and Budget, invoking OMB’s responsibility to oversee the data-collection aspects of Patent Center.  It is discussed here.
• A second letter got sent on October 15, 2023 from PTAARMIGAN to the Inspector General at the Department of Commerce.  This became the Inspector General’s complaint number 24-0055.  The Inspector General wrote:

  After careful consideration, we decided to refer your allegations(s) [sic] to management officials at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and requested that they merge this complaint with another related matter. We have requested that they conduct a thorough and independent inquiry and provide a response to us, including a detailed explanation of their review process and any corrective action, if any, they take as a result.

The USPTO says it will shut down PAIR and EFS-Web on November 8, 2023. Here is a countdown timer for the shutdown.