Ant-Like Persistence

(Update:  shortly after this blog post, a nice person at the USPTO got in touch.)

Today, the USPTO quietly fixed Patent Center bug CP31.  For more than three years, this bug was a trap for the unwary user (blog article, June 23, 2020).  The user who made the mistake of checking for outgoing correspondence using Patent Center rather than PAIR ran the risk of malpractice in two distinct ways:

• • If the user were to check for outgoing correspondence on a Monday or a Tuesday, the Patent Center report would always state that there is no outgoing correspondence even if, in truth, there was outgoing correspondence.
  • On other days of the week, on average the Patent Center report would be missing about 11% of the user’s outgoing correspondence.

Continue reading “USPTO quietly fixes Patent Center bug CP31”

When the City of Denver sold the bonds that would pay for the construction of Denver International Airport (to replace Stapleton airport), there was language in the bonds that imposed a contractual obligation:  on the day that DIA was placed into service, deep grooves would be cut into each of the runways at Stapleton.  Continue reading “Will the USPTO cut deep grooves in the airport runways?”

Update:  the meeting took place (blog article).

The USPTO’s planned shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web will be this coming Tuesday, November 7 at 11:59 PM Eastern Time (see countdown clock).  The National Association of Patent Practitioners (NAPP) wrote a letter to USPTO Director Kathi Vidal on October 31, 2023 (blog article), asking the USPTO to postpone the shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web.  In response to this letter, Commissioner for Patents Vaishali Udupa has invited NAPP to meet with her and her colleagues about Patent Center on Monday, November 6.  Others attending from the USPTO will be Deputy Commissioner for Patent Administration Richard Seidel, Richard Fernandez, and Tony Uranga.  Attending on behalf of NAPP will be its president, Rich Baker, and its vice president, Dan Smith.  The meeting will take place at 11AM Eastern Time.

It will be fascinating to hear about the results of the meeting.

(Update:  USPTO leadership has, indeed, taken corrective action (blog article).)

It crosses my mind that this kind of thing with the EBC telling people that Patent Center is not ready (see blog article) will very likely lead to a corrective action by USPTO leadership. No, I do not mean that USPTO leadership will postpone the shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web (now planned for November 8) until Patent Center is “ready”. Nor do I mean that USPTO leadership will actually do the hard work of making Patent Center “ready” between now and November 8. I mean that a memo will get circulated to the representatives at the EBC, telling them that between now and November 8, no user is to be told that the workaround for a Patent Center bug is to “use PAIR instead” or “use EFS-Web instead”.

Okay, folks, let’s try to figure out if Patent Center is actually “ready” so that the USPTO can shut down PAIR and EFS-Web.  The USPTO decisionmakers have made it very clear that the views of actual USPTO customers (many of whom say the answer is “no”) are not to be credited on this point.    But suppose there were an actual USPTO employee who communicates, by the employee’s own words and actions, that they do not think Patent Center is “ready”.  Would that be enough to convince the USPTO decisionmakers otherwise?

On October 31, 2023, USPTO customer Victoria O’Conner was trying to file a PCT application in Patent Center.  But Patent Center stopped working at the fee payment selection page.  So she called the EBC.  The EBC representative said “use EFS-Web instead”.    This was EBC ticket number 1-842304670.  This is also CP ticket number CP176.

If the USPTO were to blink (postpone the shutdown date for PAIR and EFS-Web presently scheduled for November 8), I am quite confident that I can predict the language the USPTO will use in the “blink notice”.  Continue reading “If the USPTO were to blink on the November 8 shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web …”

Hello readers!  The server that hosts this blog got hacked on October 18, during the time that I was in Washington DC for the face-to-face meeting (blog article) with USPTO people on the topic of Patent Center.  When I returned to home after these travels, I set to work dealing with the hack.  The recovery plan that I eventually arrived at was to set up a new hosting server with the plan of shutting down the old hosting server.  It was quite a lot of work to migrate all of the systems that had been on the old server, over to the new server, keeping in mind that it was very important to be extremely careful to ensure that the only stuff to be be migrated from the old server was content and not any executable code.  It meant that every instance of executable code needed to be rebuilt from scratch, from trusted sources.  And a number of new and additional protective measures needed to be in place on the new server.  And everything needed to be tested.

The way that this affects you, dear reader, is that if you are one of the thousands of subscribers to this blog, you did not get notified by email of any new blog posts after October 18.  It was just today that I successfully migrated the subscriber list over from the old (compromised) server to the new server.  So it is only today that you, as a subscriber, will resume being notified by email of new blog posts.

And this means that you did not get notified of the following nine blog posts that happened after October 18.  So here is a blog post to identify the blog posts that you did not get notified about.

• • Countdown to the shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web (October 26)
  • Daylight saving time and WIPO (October 29)
  • What happens when USPTO fails to answer letters or respond to emails or return telephone calls about Patent Center (October 31)
  • AIPLA again asks USPTO to postpone the shutdown of PAIR and EFS-Web (October 31)
  • The in-person meeting at the USPTO on October 18 about Patent Center (October 31)
  • Detailed review of USPTO’s 18-slide deck about Patent Center (October 31)
  • AIPLA and 123 Patent Practitioners each file a comment to OMB about USPTO’s DOCX initiative (October 31)
  • Argentina intellectual property office becomes even more trendy, modern and up-to-date (November 1)
  • NAPP writes to the USPTO about Patent Center not being ready (November 2)

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”