Ant-Like Persistence

Getting a priority claim wrong in a patent application is a serious matter. There’s a super-simple thing that ePCT does to prevent many ways of getting priority claims wrong, that Patentcenter fails to do.  Of course Patentcenter should do the same validation that ePCT does — cross-checking against DAS.  I’ll explain. Continue reading “Patentcenter should validate priority claims against DAS”

The coders who designed the Patentcenter workbench made a mistake in the “sort by patent number” function.  This is listserv trouble ticket number CP33. Continue reading “Patentcenter’s “sort by patent number” does not work correctly”

I bet I got your attention with that title!  Nope, I think it is extremely unlikely that whatever the title made you think of has anything at all to do with the feature of USPTO’s Patentcenter that this article is going to talk about. Continue reading “How your reptile brain reacts to an animated image of a throbber”

Readers will recall my recent sense of discouragement with USPTO’s handling of its Patentcenter rollout.  But yesterday there was an encouraging event.   I think there is some reason for guarded optimism that USPTO may do better going forward in its handling of its Patentcenter rollout. Continue reading “An encouraging step with Patentcenter”

(Update in December of 2023:  the developers have made changes to the Examiner lookup in Patent Center that fix some, but not all, of the defects that we reported to the USPTO in 2020.  See parenthetical updates below.)

One of the core design principles for Patentcenter, USPTO has said from the beginning, is that each feature of PAIR and each feature of EFS-Web will be replicated in Patentcenter.   The idea is that once the USPTO manages to replicate each and every feature of PAIR and EFS-Web into Patentcenter, and manages to get all of the programming mistakes fixed, and manages to get it to scale well under load, then USPTO will shut down PAIR and EFS-Web.  This blog article describes yet another defect, this time the Examiner lookup feature for an application in your workbench. Continue reading “A defect in Patentcenter — Examiner lookups don’t work like they do in PAIR”

(This is Patentcenter trouble ticket CP31.)

The designers of Patentcenter got it seriously wrong when they picked the default setting for the display of “Outgoing Correspondence”.  The result for practitioners who until now have been accustomed to the default setting in EFS-Web is that the “Outgoing Correspondence” feature of Patentcenter is a trap for the unwary. Continue reading “Poorly designed “outgoing correspondence” default setting in Patentcenter”

The alpha testers of Patentcenter began their work in summer of 2018, and immediately found many things that needed fixing in Patentcenter.  This blog article describes the complete failure of USPTO’s Ideascale system, which supposedly was to provide a way for the alpha testers to report the things that needed fixing. Continue reading “USPTO’s Ideascale — where good ideas go to die”